Microsoft CEO Wants One OS To Rule Them All

[Alec Mowat]

Remember Neptune and Odyssey? It was a merger of the 95/98/me kernel and the NT & 2000 kernels. Both projects were trashed and 9x was thrown away. I think this could happen to NT/2k/XP/2003/Vista/7/2008/8/2012.

No it wasn't, it was an upgrade path for Windows NT (NepTune) that was eventually merged into the XP (Odyssey) team.
It was released as "Windows XP".

It had nothing to do with merging Windows NT and DOS environments. They were trying to move consumers into the NT environment. NT had better hardware support, better, more secure drive format support and MS wanted the move consumers, and not just business, to that platform.

XP and Vista/7/8 are two different versions of Windows. Version 5.0 and 6.X

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT_6.0

I doubt Windows 9 will move out of 6.0, the differences will be cosmetic at best. DX12 is reported to run on Windows 8, so there's no need for an overhaul. The biggest advantage for Windows 6.0 was that it had a lot of support for x64 based applications, which most everything is supported on today.

Sorry, I was referring to Neptune. I believe it was a merge of 9x and NT.

NepTune (NT) was just a project to move NT from a business environment to a consumer market. There was no plan to merge with DOS. NT was more secure and more stable, it was to replace DOS, not merge with it. FAT32 is done, so was 16 bit.

Windows 9 is not going to leave the NT kernel. I doubt it will even be a version higher than Windows 8.1.
If you open "Run" and type "Winver", it will tell you the build.

Windows 8.1 is NT 6.3. Windows 7 is NT 6.1. I'm sure 9 will be NT 6.4. They all run on NTFS partitions.