Here is a compilation of the only two videos that will matter when this is all over: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCARADb9asE

The definitive obituary for OS/2 was written in 1995 with this long USENET post fro Gordon Letwin, who was the lead architect of OS/2 on the Microsoft side.

Excerpt: "What was OS/2's problem? Why was it doomed? Because it's main attraction was as an engine to run MS-Windows applications. The problem is one of standards, and one of critical mass. Standards are of incredible importance in the computing world. They're critical in other domains that folks don't often think about. Your HiFi CD player, for example. It plugs into your preamp. And that plugs into your amp. And that connects to speakers. Each of those can, and usually does, come from a different manufacturer. The RCA connectors, and the signal levels themselves, are standardized. Standardization is a big plus in the computer field. You're much better off having thousands of products and vendors compatible with a single standard, even a mediocre one, than having dozens of products, one or two each for each of a dozen fragmented standards."

...that are proven to use the headset port for accessing peripherals? Given their obsession with control, that seems like exactly the kind of thing they might want to restrict with T&C's.

Conservatives are superficially lumping network neutrality in with the rest of the anti-Obama/government/socialism rhetoric, but the issue is far too complex to capture in partisan soundbites. This Bill Moyers broadcast from a few years ago (well before Obama arrived on the scene) explains the network neutrality issue extremely well, representing multiple viewpoints, including business, politics, consumers etc. The broadcast is about an hour long, but I have yet to come across a better way to get the complete picture of what network neutrality is all about (each of these videos gives a useful illustration of a key tradeoff): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmlpfXzSfhg>Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 4 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9

Your link didn't make it, but it's a good find. I didn't know the Smithsonian collected computer documentation. As the description of this item points out: "Although Windows 3.0 proved to be successful, Microsoft wished to continue developing a 32-bit operating system completely unrelated to IBM's OS/2 architecture. To head the redesign project, Microsoft hired David Cutler and others away from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC).".

NT was a rename of the OS/2 3.0 development snapshot which Microsoft ended up with after their spat with IBM in the early 1990's and continued to evolve into the NT kernel

That's not entirely correct. Microsoft did use some OS/2 technology in the development of Windows NT, but the NT kernel itself was based on a rewrite of VMS, which was performed by one of the key developers of VMS, Dave Cutler. The OS/2 technology built into NT was primarily included for compatibility with earlier versions of OS/2.

The reason NT started at version 3 is because versions 1 and 2 were already released as the collaborative effort and named OS/2 versions 1 and 2.

Actually, from what I understood, the reason that NT started at version 3.1 is because it matched the release level of the existing (16-bit) version of Windows at the time, and Microsoft wanted to emphasize NT's compatibility with 16-bit applications in the hopes of upgrading mainstream users to NT as quickly as possible. Of course, delivering acceptable compatibility for 16-bit Windows applications in NT turned out to be a lot harder than expected, and most mainstream users did not migrate to the NT kernel until Windows XP was released in 2001.