Comment by driverdan
14 hours ago
> That’s roughly the same as someone running Windows 10 today
While true the situation is different. Hardware and software moved a lot faster in the 90's and early 2000's. Everything has matured, is far more standardized, and moves more slowly now. Hardware from 11 years ago when Win10 was released isn't that different from today's hardware. Same goes for Win10 and Win11.
There might be a seed of truth there, but FWIW, I’m not very convinced by that. CPU speed development has slowed down a bit for sure, but software development is going faster than ever. GitHub and NPM and Python 3 and Rust all didn’t exist in 2007. CUDA was first released that year. LLMs weren’t being used. At the start of 2007, the latest Windows version was Windows 5, one more than Windows 4. Almost same as today. There isn’t a Windows 12 yet, while Windows 6 was released in 2007. So the pace of major Windows versions might be slightly slower. OTOH, the OS is much bigger than it used to be and it gets more frequent updates and point releases now than it did in 2007.
> At the start of 2007, the latest Windows version was Windows 5, one more than Windows 4
Windows 2000 (NT 5.0) was released in 1999. Vista was NT 6, and released in 2006.
Where do you find 2006? My googling says NT 6 was released in early 2007, so I meant that on Jan 1 2007, Win 5 was still current. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT_6.x
It wouldn’t make a huge difference to me if 6 was released either 6 months earlier or 6 months later. In 2007, NT4 was only 1 major version behind for most people; adoption takes time. The broad timing of major versions being 4-5 years apart didn’t change until Windows 11, and we don’t know if that’s an outlier yet, but we do know that Microsoft has been changing the Windows release strategy, with more frequent updates. https://endoflife.date/windows