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by hinkley11 hours ago |
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upvoteby markus_zhang9 hours ago|
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They definitely managed to create a lot of reliable products.

Windows NT was one of them. Up to Windows XP the products were pretty solid and each had visible improvement against the previous one.

Their language products were/are still solid IMO. Maybe Visual Studio is sluggish, but we can still use an older version if we want. Plus they put a lot of effort optimizing VSCode, too.

Even back in the MS-DOS/16-bit Windows days, when things broke down quite easily, I think they still provide the best bang for individual users and developers. There was no competitors who could provide so much value back then.

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upvoteby betaby6 hours ago|
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> They definitely managed to create a lot of reliable products. > Windows NT was one of them.

Disagree. I was admining NT4.0 boxes back then and it was

1. very slow

2. constantly leaking that required weekly scheduled reboots

3. security wise it was nightmare even by that times standard

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upvoteby markus_zhang3 hours ago|
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Thanks for sharing. It was that bad back then? As a consumer user the stability brought by the NT kernel was great back then, but maybe enterprise wise it was a different story? I never worked as a sys admin so can't say.

For the last point what was the golden standard back in the mid-late 90s, if we don't include mainframe/minicomputers? Was it Solaris or BSD?

Now that I think about it, I feel sad that I do not have the technical prowess to compare operating systems :/

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upvoteby betaby45 minutes ago|
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Beside the NT4 servers we had SunOS 5.x and Digital UNIX (later upgraded to Tru64 UNIX). Yes, from sysadmin point of view they were way more consistent performance wise and less problematic to operate in general. BSDs were not 'approved' but nonetheless we were running DNS and some other internet facing stuff on OpenBSD 2.x if I remember correctly.
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upvoteby cyberax8 hours ago|
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Microsoft in the 90-s and early 2000-s was a serious company. Windows NT and Office were engineering marvels.

Windows 95 was a brilliant hack that allowed 32-bit GUI programs to run on hardware with 2Mb of RAM (Windows had 4Mb of RAM as the official minimum, but you could run it on 2Mb) while preserving compatibility with the majority of DOS software.

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