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This is rewriting history with present hindsight. NT was a hugely bloated OS (imagine an OS today that requires literally 4x the RAM of your mainstream OS just

This is rewriting history with present hindsight. NT was a hugely bloated OS (imagine an OS today that requires literally 4x the RAM of your mainstream OS just to boot) and almost killed Microsoft several times over until computing resources caught up. And still, a shitton of sacrifices had to be made to the original design until anyone outside of a server farm could run it.

andai 3y ago
> imagine an OS today that requires literally 4x the RAM of your mainstream OS This is just every OS when a new version comes out... sad! WinXP needed 64MB RAM and was considered hugely bloated at the time.
- AshamedCaptain 3y ago
  No, it's not even comparable. Windows NT came in the early 90s and required a whopping 16MB of RAM (at a time where most home PCs could not even address that much). Windows 9x came _years later_ and only required 4MB. And 9x was already considered bloated (new GUI et al).
  - sillywalk 3y ago
    To be pedantic, Windows 95 needed 8MB to be usable without constantly swapping.
    - AshamedCaptain 3y ago
      Well, to be pedantic, it's not like NT would be usable with 16MB either; I remember the desktop taking 5 minutes to show and the HDD constantly thrashing. EDIT: Actually, I just checked, and NT 3.5 opens in around 8 minutes and uses 20MiB of swap, when booted with 12MB.
  - andai 3y ago
    Interesting. What is it about NT that causes such a high memory requirement?
  - rantingdemon 3y ago
    Well, it wasn't meant for home PCs.... It was marketed and sold as a business OS. I agree with the Op (OPs?) that it was revolutionary.
pvg 3y ago
Just before Apple bought NeXT, Windows NT was a fully functional, usable workstation OS and clearly the established and future foundation of Microsoft's OS efforts. Apple had bupkis. NT vs bupkis looks really good for NT, hindsight or not! Apple pulled off a miraculous recovery but if anything, time and Apple's subsequent success has made the stark contrast then hazier.
phendrenad2 3y ago
Both of your posts are right. Windows NT was way ahead of the competition, and yes the new design was "bloated" simply because it wasn't hand-optimized for any given architecture the way Windows classic and classic Mac OS were (if that's bloated, I have bad news about Linux!) And you are right that it's unfair to compare it to Mac, because it was designed for "server farms" (or what passed as server farms back then) and it wasn't until XP that we saw it make the jump to a consumer product.
- AshamedCaptain 3y ago
  > If that's bloated, I have bad news about Linux! This remark points you don't realize how bloated NT truly was. In the 2000s I could still run Linux _and XFree86_ in under 4MB of RAM. NT in 1993 would just BSOD with less than 10MB of RAM.
  - mdekkers 3y ago
    Which clearly didn’t matter to their target market, which you didn’t represent.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - AshamedCaptain 3y ago
      The GP talks about NT, Mac, etc. in the context of home computers, a market which (by virtue of being ridiculously bloated) NT couldn't actually target for an entire decade (such market was then using OSes where the minimal requirement was more like 0.5MB of RAM). At the very least it is unfair to claim it was ahead of the other OSes in that market, since it literally couldn't even think of competing with them. The parent poster claimed the bloat was because of portability and other metrics, but this is also not true since other very much portable OSes from the next decade still had lesser minimum requirements. NT was not such a good design as it is often claimed. It was a clone of a esoteric big iron OS that they were trying to retrofit on much smaller devices. They had to backpedal on everything from microkernel to personalities in order to be able to actually market it to "their target market".
pavlov 3y ago
Windows NT was practically the perfectly timed investment because Microsoft also had the MS-DOS + Windows product to tide over the mass market while Moore’s law ensured it would eventually catch up with the much better foundation in NT. Bill Gates deserves credit for having the foresight to hire in 1988 the best people to design an operating system that wouldn’t shine until the hardware of 1998. There’s no way NT “almost killed Microsoft” because Windows 3.x was a money printer. And if that hadn’t happened, Microsoft wouldn’t have exited the OS/2 relationship. Windows NT was originally meant to be OS/2 3.0. In the worst-case scenario they could have stuck with that plan and played the role IBM had designed for them, which would also have been lucrative (although nothing like the bonanza of the desktop monopoly they had by the late 1990s).

andai 3y ago

> imagine an OS today that requires literally 4x the RAM of your mainstream OS This is just every OS when a new version comes out... sad! WinXP needed 64MB RAM and was considered hugely bloated at the time.

AshamedCaptain 3y ago
No, it's not even comparable. Windows NT came in the early 90s and required a whopping 16MB of RAM (at a time where most home PCs could not even address that much). Windows 9x came _years later_ and only required 4MB. And 9x was already considered bloated (new GUI et al).
- sillywalk 3y ago
  To be pedantic, Windows 95 needed 8MB to be usable without constantly swapping.
  - AshamedCaptain 3y ago
    Well, to be pedantic, it's not like NT would be usable with 16MB either; I remember the desktop taking 5 minutes to show and the HDD constantly thrashing. EDIT: Actually, I just checked, and NT 3.5 opens in around 8 minutes and uses 20MiB of swap, when booted with 12MB.
- andai 3y ago
  Interesting. What is it about NT that causes such a high memory requirement?
- rantingdemon 3y ago
  Well, it wasn't meant for home PCs.... It was marketed and sold as a business OS. I agree with the Op (OPs?) that it was revolutionary.

pvg 3y ago

Just before Apple bought NeXT, Windows NT was a fully functional, usable workstation OS and clearly the established and future foundation of Microsoft's OS efforts. Apple had bupkis. NT vs bupkis looks really good for NT, hindsight or not! Apple pulled off a miraculous recovery but if anything, time and Apple's subsequent success has made the stark contrast then hazier.

phendrenad2 3y ago

Both of your posts are right. Windows NT was way ahead of the competition, and yes the new design was "bloated" simply because it wasn't hand-optimized for any given architecture the way Windows classic and classic Mac OS were (if that's bloated, I have bad news about Linux!) And you are right that it's unfair to compare it to Mac, because it was designed for "server farms" (or what passed as server farms back then) and it wasn't until XP that we saw it make the jump to a consumer product.

AshamedCaptain 3y ago
> If that's bloated, I have bad news about Linux! This remark points you don't realize how bloated NT truly was. In the 2000s I could still run Linux _and XFree86_ in under 4MB of RAM. NT in 1993 would just BSOD with less than 10MB of RAM.
- mdekkers 3y ago
  Which clearly didn’t matter to their target market, which you didn’t represent.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - AshamedCaptain 3y ago
    The GP talks about NT, Mac, etc. in the context of home computers, a market which (by virtue of being ridiculously bloated) NT couldn't actually target for an entire decade (such market was then using OSes where the minimal requirement was more like 0.5MB of RAM). At the very least it is unfair to claim it was ahead of the other OSes in that market, since it literally couldn't even think of competing with them. The parent poster claimed the bloat was because of portability and other metrics, but this is also not true since other very much portable OSes from the next decade still had lesser minimum requirements. NT was not such a good design as it is often claimed. It was a clone of a esoteric big iron OS that they were trying to retrofit on much smaller devices. They had to backpedal on everything from microkernel to personalities in order to be able to actually market it to "their target market".

pavlov 3y ago

Windows NT was practically the perfectly timed investment because Microsoft also had the MS-DOS + Windows product to tide over the mass market while Moore’s law ensured it would eventually catch up with the much better foundation in NT. Bill Gates deserves credit for having the foresight to hire in 1988 the best people to design an operating system that wouldn’t shine until the hardware of 1998. There’s no way NT “almost killed Microsoft” because Windows 3.x was a money printer. And if that hadn’t happened, Microsoft wouldn’t have exited the OS/2 relationship. Windows NT was originally meant to be OS/2 3.0. In the worst-case scenario they could have stuck with that plan and played the role IBM had designed for them, which would also have been lucrative (although nothing like the bonanza of the desktop monopoly they had by the late 1990s).