Twenty years ago a good question was why did they quit having direct access to the hardware in 32-bit PCs? For a while there if you had the same business-class

Twenty years ago a good question was why did they quit having direct access to the hardware in 32-bit PCs? For a while there if you had the same business-class machines under WinXP as with Win98, the difference in speed was phenomenal. XP was just a dog and it was a loss that has never been recovered. And now you just have to live with the fact that NT5 was actually not nearly as slow as NT6 has been :\ After careful consideration it was largely attributed to the existence of a Harware Abstraction Layer in the NT form of Windows. For the longest time this was also a major speed advantage that Linux had over Windows on the same hardware.