NT4 came out after 1995. It was released in 1996. Unlike windows 95 and '98, it was a genuine NT kernel, free from DOS.
It was around a VERY VERY long time, and had SIX service packs released for it. It was not really intended for use as a consumer OS, and was intended for use in office environments and for small servers (cough.) It lacked USB support, lacked plug and play support, and a number of other things, but it DID have NTFS, REAL kernel/userland isolation, and was both stable and bitching fast once properly set up. (Setup was a royal PITA though, due to lack of plug and play, and lack of a device manager type interface to manage drivers.)
It used very few resources, and with some pokes and prods, could get a half-assed version of DX5 installed. (There was a planned, but scrubbed, version of DX5 for NT4 that got leaked. Microsoft canned further support for NT4, seeing it as the OS that refused to die, because corporate offices everywhere loved how stable and resource efficient it was, and had deployed it like Fing crazy, making it a mainstay in many office settings for the period.)
For reference, I demoed to a friend of mine how much faster NT4 was over windows 98 once, using an old 486 laptop he dumpster dived. Same exact hardware, with barebones OS, and identical MP3 playback software (Winamp)--- With win98 installed and configured, it played MP3s very chunkily, and was prone to locking up when giving playback. With NT4, it could play the same MP3 while also playing solitaire, and using wordpad, at the same time. I attribute this to better/leaner core OS programming, and a stricter set of requirements for how drivers interacted with hardware, and how the CPU did not have to keep jumping in and out of protected mode.
UI wise, NT4 strongly resembled win95, and could even have pluspack installed, giving it themes support.
For "modern" windows games (for the time), NT4 could perform quite well. (things like Diablo, etc.) It routinely outperformed win98 on the same hardware. However, the lack of plug and play made configuration a nightmare, and the lack of drivers for increasingly common devices made it more and more difficult to remain viable as an option.
Just after windows 2000 came out, Microsoft decided that they were going to abandon the 9x kernel architecture model. Since there was such a big difference between the 9x way of doing things and the NT way of doing things, they released a "bandaid" windows version that behaved more like windows 2000 (superficially) but was still fundamentally win9x underneath. Windows ME. Naturally, it was everything that was wrong with both OSes, and flopped bigtime.
Contrary to Rolan's views above, win2000 worked very well for games. It just did not let you play older DOS friendly games, and driver support was kinda spotty. (There was a 3rd party addon called
VDMSound, which allowed the NTVDM, the dos emulator shell in NT and win2k, to properly get EMS memory emulated, emulate protected mode memory allocations, emulate an SB16 sound device, etc-- features that became standard in the XP NTVDM implementation! With VDMSound installed, win2k did basically everything that XP did in terms of legacy game support.-- and then some!) It did not support all of the features of some of the more popular video cards (like the 3DFX voodoo accellerator cards), and so got a bad reputation there. It was however, fully capable of supporting the featuresets of actual GPUs, like the nVidia TNT and TNT2 cards of the era, and could roast win98 machines when set up right. It was able to handle up to directX 9, and could make full use of 4gb of system memory. (win98 had problems-- SERIOUS problems-- when more than 2GB of ram was installed.) Contrary to what some people may wish to claim, win2000 most certainly DID support plug and play, and did so very well. It still had some trouble with USB drivers though, and suffered because many drivers for common consumer devices, like printers and scanners, were built for 9x kernel, and not NT kernel flavor development models. This meant that many devices could not be made to work with windows 2000.
Like NT4, Microsoft did not intend for windows 2000 to be a consumer desktop OS. Because of that, device OEMs did not target it for driver development, which led to the driver wasteland problem.
Win2k was more resource hungry then NT4 by far, but offered a considerable update in core function of the OS, with a good no-nonsense UI that could be configured to use as few resources as possible. (all enhancements could be turned off individually if one wished, with MS's powertoy app, TweakUI. This allowed the OS to use very little processor, very little memory, and very little video hardware function to render the desktop and applications, leaving more resources available for other purposes.)
After microsoft decided to abandon the 9x flavor kernel, and the 9x flavor VxD driver model in favor of the win2k WDM model, microsoft released windows XP. At inception, it had the same problem that win2k had-- No drivers for anything, because all the device makers had been focusing on 9x flavor VxD flavor drivers, and not WDM flavor drivers. Mifrosoft made its intentions clear that there would no longer be any support for VxD flavor drivers due to security and technological reasons, and this eventually forced the OEMs out of their comfort zones and into a new era, but for a good long while, XP adoption was painful. You could buy a printer at walmart, and literally have it not work at all. Once the writing was on the wall though. device makers started releasing WDM based drivers, and things improved tremendously. When XP SP1 came out, which fixed many issues with the OS, WDM drivers were then the norm.
Since both XP and 2K used the WDM driver model, many XP drivers would work on 2K. 2K used less resources to render the deskop than XP did, and could drive just as high a directX level, so 2K became significantly less painful to drive after XP took over, however XP offered some advanced APIs in userspace that many applications, such as web browsers, took advantage of. It wasn't lack of drivers that killed 2k, it was dropped development support from software vendors, focusing on the featureset of the flagship OS released by microsoft-- which was XP. Eventually, your software just would not run at all on win2k.
XP SP2 era heralded the "Era where MS got it right." By then, hardware had improved greatly, and XP's increased resource hunger was not a painful thing any longer, and by then, OEMs were producing drivers that simply worked. XP simply worked as a result. Due to MS having to coax diehards away from win2k, they offered features to cut back Aqua to minimal levels with a more win2k UI look and feel, if you were willing to go through the trouble of shutting all the aqua shit down. (But doing so naturally broke lots of API functions that many software makers made use of, so it was troublesome.) It quickly became an OS that worked and worked well for pretty much any purpose. It had a very functional UI paradigm with managable levels of eye candy bloat. it was reasonably secure when configured properly and used sensibly, and was a clean, easy fit in both homes and office settings.
Then microsoft jumped the shark. They realized that with a very well polished OS, people had no reason to upgrade and keep paying them money, which their business model was based on. Further service packs to XP would only bite them in the ass later, as people had less and less incentive to switch to the new shiny. They had experienced this with corporate userbase with NT4 prior, and decided that they would NOT release any more service packs for XP, and hardlined that they were going to strictly cut off support for XP completely, and set a deadline, issuing an ultimatum of sorts. This was because Vista adoption was very low-- Vista, like all new versions of windows, greatly expanded the underlying featureset of the OS-- but it also was bloated with UI candy that could not be disabled, and had some dodgy userspace code going on. It furhter revised the WDM driver model to a newer, and thus incompatible, version, and broke backward compatibility with older drivers, meaning lots of hardware wouldnt work with vista. There just wasn't a whole lot of incentive to upgrade.
In danger of having very below-expected quarterly figures for 3 consecutive quarters, microsoft started doubling down on things, releasing software upgrades to other core packages (like office and Internet explorer) that would artificially refuse to install on XP, and demand vista or better for purely marketing purposes. (I know this is true, because you could fake the installers out with some registry pokes and temporarily overwritten system files, the programs would install just fine, and when you undid the changes needed to fake out the installers, they ran just fine! No hiccups at all!) This lasted awhile, but eventually windows 7 hit the market. By then, OEMs had again been forced to update their developer tools to support the newer, updated version of the WDM model, and win7 could use Vista drivers. Once again, "Everything just worked."
Long story short, the REAL contributing factor in "Does the OS suck balls or not?" comes down to 2 simple things.
1) Driver availability/maturity.
2) UI responsiveness/stability and familiarity.
When the MS OS has BOTH of those things, "Things just work", and it is good for users.
When one of those things is missing, shit does not work, or people cant find things, or can't use the OS.
Windows Vista lacked #1.
Windows 8 lacked #2. (8.1 returns familiar desktop paradigms to the user interface, resolving much of this problem, revealing windows 8.1 to be a very strong, healthy, and usable OS.)
Windows 10 suffers from the "You added YET MORE BLOAT to the UI! God damn you microsoft!" problem, which falls into #2-- Microsoft seems to believe that they can force people away from a known working desktop paradigm in favor of something new and mostly untested, because that new paradigm will permit them to do less work when making applications intended for disparate device types. (Tablets, phones, and PCs.) They are simply NOT getting the message that PC use cases and Tablet use cases simply do not overlap the way they want them to, and that users DO NOT WANT THIS HOMOGENEITY.
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Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 14494608 times)