Lord_Majestic - 1:50 am on Oct 16, 2008 (gmt 0)

The move from 16 bit to 32 bit x86 architecture was very difficult because of complete change in memory management - that brings back compatibility issue which was paramaunt - no Microsoft OS that would not be backwards compatible would have been commercially successful at the time, in fact finally just now 20 years past they stopped supporting 16-bit programs in 64-bit version of OS, this support is still available in 32-bit version.

You mention Macs but don't talk about compatibility issues that they had in their OSes and processors - that is one of the reasons why they lost the game despite having early advantage of GUI.

386 (think released in 1986) were very expensive at start anyway, and Windows 2.1 supported 386 protected mode in 1988 - which is just a couple of years past the release of the CPU, that's pretty good timing actually. Naturally Microsoft never bothered to create protected mode DOS because it was dead end and they did not want to dillute the correct path which was Windows.