I think you need to understand that most people maybe had 16~32MB of system RAM on average circa 1999, while Windows 2000 ideally wanted at least a staggering 128MB as just a sysreq recommendation. Windows 98 was fine with 16MB minimum or even 8MB with some wizardry.
How much did 128MB of RAM cost in 1999? According to a Reddit thread that Copilot found, about $370 in 2020 dollars[1]. Copilot also dug up another thread[2] where people reminisced about RAM capacity and pricing in the 90s.
So in very basic terms, 128MB of RAM (let alone more!) back then would be like buying 128GB of RAM today. Most people simply aren't going to buy ~$400 of RAM just like that, especially when upgrade cycles were also much shorter than today.
There was a very practical reason Windows 9x existed alongside Windows NT until XP merged the lines in 2001 when 256~512MB of RAM and more became much more affordable.
> I think you need to understand that most people maybe had 16~32MB of system RAM on average circa 1999, while Windows 2000 ideally wanted at least a staggering 128MB as just a sysreq recommendation.
I do understand. I was there. My personal PCs from that time had 16MB (a getting old AMD 5x86 133) and 32MB (Celeron 300A w/ the 450Mhz "mod"), and I ran Linux and Windows 95/98 on them. I didn't get W2K at home until late 2001 and that was only because I splurged.
Windows 2000 was a ridiculous luxury item for home users at the time, but for business PCs it was a real winner. It was so much more stable than Windows 95/98. The "we build PCs" shop I worked at did a good job of convincing business Customers to spend the extra money for stability. Only a minority bit on the idea, but people definitely talked about seeing fewer reboots and better multitasking w/ the W2K machines. It helped sell itself.
(We also did least-privilege user accounts all the way back in the NT 4.0 days. "Cleaning up" the malware of the day was so easy because, by and large, you could just blow away the user's profile and start with a fresh registry. Since the user didn't have Administrator rights making machine-wide changes was "off limits" for most malware of the time.)
IIRC one of 2000s main design advantages is that when a installer tried to crap various dlls into the windows directory it redirected them back to their own install and only used them for that program. This basically solved the dll hell problem that tended to rot 9x installs after 6 months.
I was a cheap ass but I remember ponying up for extra ram and switching to 2000 quite early which is something I never do these days.
Indeed. When Microsoft called them Windows NT 4.0 Workstation and Windows 2000 Professional, they damn well meant it.
You said "decent amount of RAM" in a very nonchalant fashion, so I felt that maybe a reorienting of the focal lens was necessary. RAM today is so mundane everyone wastes it without a care in the world[1], but it wasn't always this way.
> most people maybe had 16~32MB of system RAM on average circa 1999
For old computers maybe. I never actually heard of anyone doing an upgrade-install of Windows though.
I had 64MB in ... probably 1998 and we weren't even a computer-focused household. And your second link seems to back that up ("early 1999"), and that was a major improvement that basically obsoleted our old '95 computer but managed to last until well into the XP era ... huh, which is actually only the same 3 years apart, though we got SP1 which was a year after that.
It's kind of weird how Microsoft released a different OS each year for 4 years in a row.
Some users had to install DOS, then Win3, then Win9x, just to get to (say) Win98SE.
It was a thing.
IBM sold an entire edition of OS/2 Warp that required you to already have Windows 3.1 installed in order to use Windows compatibility. It was called the "Red Spine" edition:
Indeed. I remember running Windows 95 on a 32MB machine and stayed on Windows 95 even after 98, 98SE, ME, 2000 were released simply because that's what worked well on the machines I had at the time. IRRC I had a P166MMX with 32MB of RAM from 1997 which remained my main machine for some years. Win95 only needed the correct drivers for the newer post-1995 hardware. I ended up skipping 98, 98SE, ME, 2000 and going straight to XP for my next upgrade at some point in the early 2000's as I had acquired a new machine which couldn't run Windows 95 without a whole lot of patches and Firefox eventually dropped support for Windows 95. By then the hardware I had was good enough that XP worked fine.
