That's quite a gap, though. Windows 95 could (but you wouldn't want to) run on a 386 with 4 MB of RAM. 8 MB was recommended. New PCs were still being sold in

That's quite a gap, though. Windows 95 could (but you wouldn't want to) run on a 386 with 4 MB of RAM. 8 MB was recommended. New PCs were still being sold in 1995 with less than 8 MB of RAM. Both NT 3.51 and 4.0 had a minimum requirement of 12 MB just to start. You'd want more to have breathing room. Few new machines could meet that in '96, let alone the large base of 486 and even 386 machines still kicking around. I figure that if Microsoft had released NT as a consumer OS that early (with 3.5 or 4.0) it would have been a disaster. There wasn't much of a market for a new OS that required twice the specs of the average new PC while having mediocre backwards compatibility. Even if it didn't crash much.