Comment by linguae

I remember those days. Thankfully Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 had a Windows 95/98-style desktop but used the rock-solid NT kernel. Unfortunately they were not marketed to home users.

I feel similarly about the classic Mac OS: excellent interface and UI guidelines hampered by its cooperative multitasking and its lack of protected memory.

Windows XP and Mac OS X were major blessings, bringing the NT kernel and Mach/BSD underpinnings, respectively, to home computing users.