3 ms·

> everyone except cheapskates with rubbish PCs Colloquially known as “the public.”

lproven 5y ago
Kinda sorta ish. Win98 was intended for, and was a good fit for, home users. It was aimed at games, multimedia, portables (not new by then, but affordable mass-market ones were quite new) and causal internet use, which for most people then meant dial-up internet. It had no firewall, for example, and so would have been owned in seconds if attached to an always-on connection. NT 4 was intended for, and was a good fit for, business users, especially with relatively high-end well-specced desktops because it had next-to-no support for power management, no USB support, no hot-plug of PCMCIA cards, etc. I don't think home vs. business maps well onto public vs., um, not public... do you? I mean, business means work, for many it means offices, and most working people are members of the public, aren't they? Even if they work in state or government departments, most of them are members of the public. "Not members of the public" to me implies, I don't know, police officers, people in the military, maybe elected officials.
- justin66 5y ago
  You sperged pretty hard on “public,” but the point is that NT’s market share was a rounding error - let’s just say approximately everywhere, in every domain - until memory was cheap enough for the cost difference not to matter. It might’ve gone differently if Windows 9x were unable to log onto NT domains, or something, but it was perfectly usable (and was widely used) in business. Your statement NT 4 fixed that, and it took off very well for everyone except cheapskates with rubbish PCs was counterfactual, but for the reason that those were the PCs businesses liked and wanted.
  - lproven 5y ago
    I had to Google "sperged". That's not a nice thing to say about anyone. I know nothing about your experience, but I know about mine, as both a full-time sysadmin and tech support guy, and later a freelance consultant, for pretty much all of the 1990s. What you are claiming as universal truths are not. In your world, where you saw, maybe there was little to no NT. But that is not the case everywhere. I lived and worked in London, and as a freelance consultant, I mostly worked for relatively prosperous individuals and companies, because if someone's not well off financially they don't hire consultants. Serious businesses, in more or less every sector I worked in -- in real estate, in finance, in publishing, in media, in law -- used NT. NT 3.x was niche. NT 4 wasn't. It did well and it didn't only take over servers; I put in maybe hundreds of NT 4 boxes for dozens of companies. It was not bulletproof -- but it was very nearly so compared to a toy gamers' OS like Win98, and by the time W98 came out, 2 years after NT 4, NT 4 was everywhere for anyone who could afford to buy a PC specced for what they needed. The only thing NT 4 was really bad at was laptops, and some determined folk ran it there as well. USB stayed niche until after the iMac, so the fact that NT 4 didn't support it didn't matter to most people. What mattered is if you needed your PC to be reliable, and most business people do and will pay for a more reliable box. I am saying you are wrong when you say that its market share was a rounding error. Not in the UK, not in London where I was from 1991 to 2014, *no*. NT 4 owned business computing. Win98 owned homes and gamers but I had a grand total of one (1) client _ever_ who ran all Win98 on their client PCs, and their server still ran NT 4.

Kinda sorta ish. Win98 was intended for, and was a good fit for, home users. It was aimed at games, multimedia, portables (not new by then, but affordable mass-market ones were quite new) and causal internet use, which for most people then meant dial-up internet. It had no firewall, for example, and so would have been owned in seconds if attached to an always-on connection. NT 4 was intended for, and was a good fit for, business users, especially with relatively high-end well-specced desktops because it had next-to-no support for power management, no USB support, no hot-plug of PCMCIA cards, etc. I don't think home vs. business maps well onto public vs., um, not public... do you? I mean, business means work, for many it means offices, and most working people are members of the public, aren't they? Even if they work in state or government departments, most of them are members of the public. "Not members of the public" to me implies, I don't know, police officers, people in the military, maybe elected officials.

justin66 5y ago
You sperged pretty hard on “public,” but the point is that NT’s market share was a rounding error - let’s just say approximately everywhere, in every domain - until memory was cheap enough for the cost difference not to matter. It might’ve gone differently if Windows 9x were unable to log onto NT domains, or something, but it was perfectly usable (and was widely used) in business. Your statement NT 4 fixed that, and it took off very well for everyone except cheapskates with rubbish PCs was counterfactual, but for the reason that those were the PCs businesses liked and wanted.
- lproven 5y ago
  I had to Google "sperged". That's not a nice thing to say about anyone. I know nothing about your experience, but I know about mine, as both a full-time sysadmin and tech support guy, and later a freelance consultant, for pretty much all of the 1990s. What you are claiming as universal truths are not. In your world, where you saw, maybe there was little to no NT. But that is not the case everywhere. I lived and worked in London, and as a freelance consultant, I mostly worked for relatively prosperous individuals and companies, because if someone's not well off financially they don't hire consultants. Serious businesses, in more or less every sector I worked in -- in real estate, in finance, in publishing, in media, in law -- used NT. NT 3.x was niche. NT 4 wasn't. It did well and it didn't only take over servers; I put in maybe hundreds of NT 4 boxes for dozens of companies. It was not bulletproof -- but it was very nearly so compared to a toy gamers' OS like Win98, and by the time W98 came out, 2 years after NT 4, NT 4 was everywhere for anyone who could afford to buy a PC specced for what they needed. The only thing NT 4 was really bad at was laptops, and some determined folk ran it there as well. USB stayed niche until after the iMac, so the fact that NT 4 didn't support it didn't matter to most people. What mattered is if you needed your PC to be reliable, and most business people do and will pay for a more reliable box. I am saying you are wrong when you say that its market share was a rounding error. Not in the UK, not in London where I was from 1991 to 2014, *no*. NT 4 owned business computing. Win98 owned homes and gamers but I had a grand total of one (1) client _ever_ who ran all Win98 on their client PCs, and their server still ran NT 4.