Comment by protomyth
7 years ago
Maybe my memory is a bit rose colored, but I still think NT 4.0 was great. Win 95 interface and rock solid OS.
7 years ago
Maybe my memory is a bit rose colored, but I still think NT 4.0 was great. Win 95 interface and rock solid OS.
Windows 2000 was even more rock-solid. I used to run it on a couple of Sony Vaio laptops and I never had a blue screen.
Didn't they move the video driver back into the kernel in 2000?
Yeah, but they actually worked so it was fine.
Of course, I will not attest to any architectural advantage of NT, especially today. Everything from the filesystem to the schedulers to the memory management... it all leaves a lot to be desired. Maybe with Genode coming along, we'll get a serviceable seL4 desktop that I can run my Chicago-style UI on. :- )
My impression of the eventual ideal is that the formally-verified stuff can be allowed into the kernel, if there is some valid reason to do so; and everything else can sit elsewhere.
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I'm not commenting on the OS architecture, just my quite extensive user experience.
You were definitely living in the future with NT 4.0. But the memory requirements were way too high for the average home user to afford it. Win95 was a bridge into this modern new world of applications protected from each other.