Quote:
Originally Posted by BWinmill
While Windows 3.x and Windows 95 were sufficient for most people because it got the job done, people are forgetting how truly unstable those platforms were. Even when problems were a product of third party software, people are forgetting how the more rigorous memory protection of Unix, OS/2, and Windows NT enabled developers to detect and resolve memory addressing problems during the development phase. Thankfully, Microsoft has made incredible progress on that front.
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What many people forget is that Windows 3.x was not an operating system. It was a DOS-application with its own memory management. Other DOS-applications, such as games, often used DOS4GW as extended memory manager; Windows 3.x had its own stuff. This was one of the things that made Windows 3.x unstable.
Windows 95 should never have existed. It was Windows 4.0, tacked on top of DOS 7.0, extended with the Win32 API coming from Windows NT 3.x. Microsoft should have skipped Windows 95, and and put the stuff Windows 95 did better (better DirectX support so more games could run, a device manager, a more powerful DOS-emulator to compete with Windows 95's native DOS-support) into NT4. USB was already introduced in 1996, and NT4 had no support for it. It should have had, even if it would have pushed back the release into 1997. (There were some third party stacks, to support mice, keyboards, and some specific scanners and printers.)
As I said, Windows 95/98/ME should never have existed, and the world should have switched from Windows 3.1 to Windows NT 4.
I did; I ran OS/2 3.0 (and Windows 3.1 on top of it) from 1994 to 1996, first with 4MB and then 8MB RAM, and then switched to Windows NT 4 as soon as I was able, first upgrading that computer to 16MB, and later, 32MB. Therefore I never had any of the Windows crashing problems of the time.