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Indeed. Windows NT (and OS/2) were better from a purity standpoint but they were too far ahead of their time due to their high ram requirements (a whopping 4 me
by InclinedPlane 8y ago
Indeed. Windows NT (and OS/2) were better from a purity standpoint but they were too far ahead of their time due to their high ram requirements (a whopping 4 megabytes per 16-bit application run!). It took a half a decade for hardware to get sufficiently better and cheaper for the compromises of the Windows 95 era to no longer make sense. Also, it's funny how now with Docker we're going back to this multi-tenancy process isolation model (which was the major secret sauce of Windows 95) instead of running everything in full blown VMs.
- scruffyherder 8y agoThe difference is we had threadding back then, and we also had a more robust set of databases & support libraries. Now everyone is reinventing wheels. poorly.
- JdeBP 8y agoThat 4MiB per application assertion is not true of OS/2. 4MiB was minimal physical RAM requirements for 32-bit OS/2, which I myself ran on a 4MiB machine for a while, but it did not scale up from that by number of applications run, let alone by number of 16-bit applications.