EDIT: and I have no clue where you are going with the windows NT kernel (the only difference, was, 98's was monolithic).
Go read it on wiki. NT was a complete rewrite of the OS written by a load of engineers that Microsoft hired in from DEC. The 9x series were just extended versions of DOS, which is why they sucked so hard.
Earlier versions of NT (3-4) were quite different to the contemporary consumer Windows. It wasn't until Windows 2000 that they had an NT version that could reliably run software designed for the 9x series. I remember game boxes used to specifically state "Not compatible with Windows NT"
Mark Papermaster and Don Estridge (I already mentioned that somewhere else).
Estridge et al. were given a year to hack together some off the shelf components to make a computer that was sufficiently good to be competitive in the personal computer market, but not too good so that it wouldn't compete with IBM's higher end machines. There was nothing innovative about what they did, in fact, it was exactly the opposite. They considered using superior CPUs such as the Motorola 68k or the IBM 801 (the ancestor of the POWER architecture) but eventually settled on the 8088 because they thought that more people would want to program for it given the amount of Intel 8080 and Zilog Z80 machines that were around. IBM projected that they'd make 50,000 of them before they'd scrap it and sell something better.
And we've been stuck with it ever since.
You should know XP and 98 generally have backwards-compatibility concerning drivers.
To an extent. 98 could use the newer driver type and the DOS type. NT couldn't use the DOS drivers. A lot of old hardware that worked under 98 didn't under XP.
Either way, as you pointed out, none of those drivers work under Vista and 7, and weren't you trying to make some point about new versions of Apple stuff being incompatible with older ones?
The kernel really didn't do anything in that regard:
It's not just the kernel, it's the whole back end of the OS. NT introduced the concept of a Hardware Abstraction Layer, which as the name would imply, acted as a layer between the software running on the OS and the machine's hardware. DOS (and by extension 9x) software could deal with the hardware directly, which caused pretty serious problems if the software did something wrong. NT's HAL ensured that if software did something wrong, it wouldn't take the system down. This is why you generally get an awful lot less blue screens under Win2k or later unless you're using dodgy drivers. It's also why NT had to have a different driver system.
in fact, I can run some DOS games natively in XP.
I highlighted the important part of this sentence. I remember quite well when I got my first Win XP machine, discovering to my horror that a load of my old DOS games (and even some 95/98 games although thankfully not all) just didn't run any more.
In fact, NT doesn't run any DOS stuff natively, it does it through a sort of virtual machine if memory serves me correct, which is why compatibility can be a hit and miss afair. 9x could run them natively because it
was DOS, which meant better compatibility but had a lot of reliability issues.
Either way, it's a pointless debate given that all 64-bit versions of Windows have zero DOS compatibility anyway, so again you're criticizing Apple for having a failing that Windows also has.
I'd suggest you do your homework on the windows driver standards, and, just how compatible they are.
I already have, kktnxbai.
