4 ms·

Maybe it’s possible for opposite things to be true if they happen to different people. I wasn’t a developer back then. Windows NT required a multiple more RAM

by Decade 6y ago

Maybe it’s possible for opposite things to be true if they happen to different people. I wasn’t a developer back then. Windows NT required a multiple more RAM to run than the consumer versions of Windows (oh no, bloat!), and was much more picky about what hardware it ran on. Starting with XP, the professional and consumer versions of Windows have merged. We are so lucky.

acqq 6y ago
> I wasn’t a developer back then. That explains your inaccurate perspective. > Windows NT required a multiple more RAM to run than the consumer versions of Windows (oh no, bloat!), and was much more picky about what hardware it ran on. Allow me to claim that that is also not true, in the form you state it. Again, I've lived through all this, and I can tell you what that was about. The "pickiness" of NT was even at these times not about the motherboards and the chipsets. It was about the hardware consumer devices. Many things that probably don't even exist as the products today, like a black-and-white hand-scanner that scanned as you moved your hand over the paper and had only Windows 3.x drivers on the floppy with it. There was never a problem of having a developer machine running NT in any reasonable price range, with a reasonable graphic card, monitor, keyboard and mouse. And, at the start, a phone line modem transmitting some kilobytes per second! The RAM needs did exist, but again not such as they are made to be believed by later distortions. If I remember correctly (it changed relatively fast), at the time NT was published, Microsoft had to deliver it claiming that it will run on 4 MB, the OS and the programs and the graphics, all had to fit. Let me repeat, 4 MB. It run, but not comfortably for bigger programs. But the point is -- as soon as you at that time had 8 MB you haven't had a problem. A little later, for comfortable work, 16 MB were more than a good choice. It was a hundred, two or three of $ more than the cheapest possible offer (yes, that were the prices then), but that was it. RAM was the only thing you had to care about to have NT running. The point is, at that time there were enough those who didn't want to use Windows NT at all, clutching to 3.x and then 95 and these are those who promoted the horror stories about OS problems. But it was just their ignorance. 95 was also reasonably stable, unless you used, like many, some "utility" programs that were more malware than of real use (the "cleaning", "protection" or even "ram expander" snake oils were used by some even then -- no to mention that a lot of people believed they had to try any program that happens to access them). The good development tools were good and stable, especially command line (in GUI areas, there were some snake oils among them too). But Word did crash even under NT, and even during the first half of 2000-s decade, and that's completely different story, that was intentional at that time for these products.
- Decade 6y ago
  > That explains your inaccurate perspective. Yep, you really succeeded at empathy, there. /s > reasonable price range The word “reasonable” is doing a lot of work, here. Most Pentium II systems were not running Windows NT. They were running Windows 95 or 98, which had arbitrarily severe limitations and lacked memory protections. So, while it was technically possible to run lots of applications simultaneously on 256 MB of RAM, for most people it was a fun adventure in whether some buggy program has destabilized the system into needing to reboot to run properly again. Or whether it’s still usable with degraded functionality. In my case, that’s without using the cleaning, protection, RAM expander programs. And even on professional operating systems, web browsers crashed a lot, and any other program that had to deal with untrusted input, which is basically anything that can open files or connect to the network, has gradually bloated as they learn security or add features.
  - acqq 6y ago
    > Most Pentium II systems were not running Windows NT. They were running Windows 95 or 98 Once again: only somebody using a computer not selected for serious development used Windows 95 and 98. No developer who knew what he was doing was using Windows 95 and 98 as his primary development machine. So if you complain about that, you used the wrong tool for your work. Like I've said, it was easy to install Windows NT, and I don't know any computer which wasn't able to run it, if it had reasonably enough RAM. > on 256 MB of RAM To illustrate "reasonably" once again, that changed at these times: I remember buying an AMD-based notebook in 2002 with 256 MB and running absolutely without problems Windows 2000 on it for a few years, before upgrading to 512 MB, which was the maximum for that notebook. And that was the time of Pentium III and IV, not Pentium II, and like I've said, I've run Windows NT on 8 MB computers, all with compilers, resource editors, debuggers and even IDE. And even before, I've run Windows 3.11 on 2 MB computer and used that for development too (the development tools being in text mode, of course). > some buggy program has destabilized the system into needing to reboot to run properly again Only on non-NT systems, and surely not developer tools. I used Windows 3.x and Windows 9x, and never had to reboot due to the developer tools "making system unstable." Not even on a 4 MB or a 16 MB machine. > web browsers crashed a lot I've used both Mosaic and Netscape, and before 2000 my main problem was surely not them crashing. Surfing mostly worked (only the pages loaded slowly, there were no CDNs then). Again, on a NT system.

by Decade 6y ago

acqq 6y ago

> I wasn’t a developer back then. That explains your inaccurate perspective. > Windows NT required a multiple more RAM to run than the consumer versions of Windows (oh no, bloat!), and was much more picky about what hardware it ran on. Allow me to claim that that is also not true, in the form you state it. Again, I've lived through all this, and I can tell you what that was about. The "pickiness" of NT was even at these times not about the motherboards and the chipsets. It was about the hardware consumer devices. Many things that probably don't even exist as the products today, like a black-and-white hand-scanner that scanned as you moved your hand over the paper and had only Windows 3.x drivers on the floppy with it. There was never a problem of having a developer machine running NT in any reasonable price range, with a reasonable graphic card, monitor, keyboard and mouse. And, at the start, a phone line modem transmitting some kilobytes per second! The RAM needs did exist, but again not such as they are made to be believed by later distortions. If I remember correctly (it changed relatively fast), at the time NT was published, Microsoft had to deliver it claiming that it will run on 4 MB, the OS and the programs and the graphics, all had to fit. Let me repeat, 4 MB. It run, but not comfortably for bigger programs. But the point is -- as soon as you at that time had 8 MB you haven't had a problem. A little later, for comfortable work, 16 MB were more than a good choice. It was a hundred, two or three of $ more than the cheapest possible offer (yes, that were the prices then), but that was it. RAM was the only thing you had to care about to have NT running. The point is, at that time there were enough those who didn't want to use Windows NT at all, clutching to 3.x and then 95 and these are those who promoted the horror stories about OS problems. But it was just their ignorance. 95 was also reasonably stable, unless you used, like many, some "utility" programs that were more malware than of real use (the "cleaning", "protection" or even "ram expander" snake oils were used by some even then -- no to mention that a lot of people believed they had to try any program that happens to access them). The good development tools were good and stable, especially command line (in GUI areas, there were some snake oils among them too). But Word did crash even under NT, and even during the first half of 2000-s decade, and that's completely different story, that was intentional at that time for these products.

Decade 6y ago
> That explains your inaccurate perspective. Yep, you really succeeded at empathy, there. /s > reasonable price range The word “reasonable” is doing a lot of work, here. Most Pentium II systems were not running Windows NT. They were running Windows 95 or 98, which had arbitrarily severe limitations and lacked memory protections. So, while it was technically possible to run lots of applications simultaneously on 256 MB of RAM, for most people it was a fun adventure in whether some buggy program has destabilized the system into needing to reboot to run properly again. Or whether it’s still usable with degraded functionality. In my case, that’s without using the cleaning, protection, RAM expander programs. And even on professional operating systems, web browsers crashed a lot, and any other program that had to deal with untrusted input, which is basically anything that can open files or connect to the network, has gradually bloated as they learn security or add features.
- acqq 6y ago
  > Most Pentium II systems were not running Windows NT. They were running Windows 95 or 98 Once again: only somebody using a computer not selected for serious development used Windows 95 and 98. No developer who knew what he was doing was using Windows 95 and 98 as his primary development machine. So if you complain about that, you used the wrong tool for your work. Like I've said, it was easy to install Windows NT, and I don't know any computer which wasn't able to run it, if it had reasonably enough RAM. > on 256 MB of RAM To illustrate "reasonably" once again, that changed at these times: I remember buying an AMD-based notebook in 2002 with 256 MB and running absolutely without problems Windows 2000 on it for a few years, before upgrading to 512 MB, which was the maximum for that notebook. And that was the time of Pentium III and IV, not Pentium II, and like I've said, I've run Windows NT on 8 MB computers, all with compilers, resource editors, debuggers and even IDE. And even before, I've run Windows 3.11 on 2 MB computer and used that for development too (the development tools being in text mode, of course). > some buggy program has destabilized the system into needing to reboot to run properly again Only on non-NT systems, and surely not developer tools. I used Windows 3.x and Windows 9x, and never had to reboot due to the developer tools "making system unstable." Not even on a 4 MB or a 16 MB machine. > web browsers crashed a lot I've used both Mosaic and Netscape, and before 2000 my main problem was surely not them crashing. Surfing mostly worked (only the pages loaded slowly, there were no CDNs then). Again, on a NT system.