4 ms·

It's always strange to hear Windows being actually good in the 90s and early 2000s, but so much of that was the fact that the consumer oriented, DOS based OSes,

It's always strange to hear Windows being actually good in the 90s and early 2000s, but so much of that was the fact that the consumer oriented, DOS based OSes, were so poor. The switch to the NT platform in Windows XP was incredible. Of course, a lot of that was lost in teh beginning with the "Fisher Price" UI, and the massive rise of malware, but by SP2 most of these issues were resolved... Windows XP SP2 was one of the most stable and long lasting consumer OS of probably all time. I wonder if Microsoft could have switched to NT for its consumer OSes earlier, and if so, how much better Windows based computing for most people would have been. Combine that with the Longhorn disaster, and MS lost so many years of precious development time.

steve1977 4y ago
You could always turn off the Fisher Price UI and switch to Windows Classic style, up to Windows 7 actually.
pavlov 4y ago
Windows NT 4.0 was tight in its time. (Despite the name, NT 4 was really version 2.0 of the NT operating system.) It had the new kernel that could compete with (and even outperform) commercial Unix for workstation use, and also the new GUI from Windows 95 which meant it was both familiar and had an enormous range of apps easily available. Not only was Windows NT 4 enormously better than DOS, but it was also objectively better as a total package than Mac OS 8, the Sun Solaris CDE desktop, and everything else. Open source Linux desktops were still very early. Windows 2000 (a.k.a. NT 5) was still good and a much more practical desktop OS than the first Mac OS X which had absolutely horrendous performance. Somehow Microsoft managed to squander this lead by focusing on consumer Windows XP and their own endless .NET API turf wars that ended up destroying the credibility of the Windows platform.
- GeekyBear 4y ago
  > Not only was Windows NT 4 enormously better than DOS, but it was also objectively better as a total package than Mac OS 8, the Sun Solaris CDE desktop, and everything else. The issues were that Windows NT needed much more RAM than consumer Windows at a time when RAM was still extremely expensive, and only a subset of the hardware that would work under consumer versions of Windows had drivers for Windows NT. However, NT (and especially Windows 2000) was night and day better than Windows 9x.
72deluxe 4y ago
The sad thing is that we remember that era and being used to fast user interfaces and applications even on the ancient hardware. Today's software is so sluggish and slow and all web based even when native toolkits are perfect. Makes me weep.

steve1977 4y ago

You could always turn off the Fisher Price UI and switch to Windows Classic style, up to Windows 7 actually.

pavlov 4y ago

Windows NT 4.0 was tight in its time. (Despite the name, NT 4 was really version 2.0 of the NT operating system.) It had the new kernel that could compete with (and even outperform) commercial Unix for workstation use, and also the new GUI from Windows 95 which meant it was both familiar and had an enormous range of apps easily available. Not only was Windows NT 4 enormously better than DOS, but it was also objectively better as a total package than Mac OS 8, the Sun Solaris CDE desktop, and everything else. Open source Linux desktops were still very early. Windows 2000 (a.k.a. NT 5) was still good and a much more practical desktop OS than the first Mac OS X which had absolutely horrendous performance. Somehow Microsoft managed to squander this lead by focusing on consumer Windows XP and their own endless .NET API turf wars that ended up destroying the credibility of the Windows platform.

GeekyBear 4y ago
> Not only was Windows NT 4 enormously better than DOS, but it was also objectively better as a total package than Mac OS 8, the Sun Solaris CDE desktop, and everything else. The issues were that Windows NT needed much more RAM than consumer Windows at a time when RAM was still extremely expensive, and only a subset of the hardware that would work under consumer versions of Windows had drivers for Windows NT. However, NT (and especially Windows 2000) was night and day better than Windows 9x.

72deluxe 4y ago

The sad thing is that we remember that era and being used to fast user interfaces and applications even on the ancient hardware. Today's software is so sluggish and slow and all web based even when native toolkits are perfect. Makes me weep.