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I think one of the problems is the RAM prices back then, which also affected Windows NT sales. 4Mbit DRAM chips was for example costing more than $10 a piece.
by yuhong 10y ago
I think one of the problems is the RAM prices back then, which also affected Windows NT sales. 4Mbit DRAM chips was for example costing more than $10 a piece.
- pvg 10y agoThat's true but the original Next machine shipped with 8 megs which by 1995 was the recommended amount for Windows 95. There are lots of reasons Nextstep was a commercial failure, I just don't think 'hardware requirements' is fundamentally very high on the list. 1995 was just at the beginning of a rapid decline in DRAM prices, to boot.
- yuhong 10y agoMS spent a lot of effort trying to fit Win95 into 4 megs for a reason. I don't think NeXTStep with only 8 megs were a popular configuration, many was upgraded to 16 megs.
- pvg 10y agoWin95 didn't fit in 4 megs all that well. But that's neither here nor there since we're in a parallel universe in which MS started working on Nextstep in 1985 and released a consumer OS based on it in 1995. This seems totally plausible. Next Inc was never really making a consumer OS. In 2007, Apple shipped a Nextstep derivative that ran in 128 megs while its desktop (and consumer) counterpart wasn't really happy with anything less than a couple of gigs.