I didn't get the chance to use NT 3/4 but maybe that's for another day!
I still remember the day my father installed Windows 3.1, pure magic. I have never used any GUI OS before that (that was DOS and then we went straight for Win 3.1).
I was building a PC for a broke mate of mine, and all I had to spare was about 40MB of RAM. The choice was either Windows ME, which didn't run great in that little, or NT4, for which it was quite generous.
NT4 looked like Win95 and it was quite solid. No power management, no USB support, not FAT32, but it didn't crash. WinME did all them but was not very stable.
NT changed significantly over its lifetime. I deployed and supported all versions in production.
NT 3.1: first release. Big, slow, no long filenames on FAT, needed a crazy 32MB of RAM in 1993, meaning a £5000+ PC. But very solid, and great networking.
NT 3.5: LFNs on FAT. Bit smaller and faster and more stable.
NT 3.51: a classic release. Smaller and faster still. I ran my home fileserver on NT 3.51 for years, in 8MB of RAM. Slow on the console, fine over a 10Mb/sec LAN. Absolutely rock solid, very quick.
NT 4: finally you get Explorer and the Win95 desktop, but bigger, slower, less stable. No plug'n'play, only very rudimentary power management, little to no useful 3D support. Not much use on laptops. But looked as good as Win95/98 and was as easy to use.
NT 5, AKA "Windows 2000": finally, full power management, full PnP, hotplug, USB, FAT32. All the good stuff that NT4 couldn't do. Bigger, slower, but very solid and worked well.
NT 5.1, AKA "Windows XP": Win2K plus themes, some bundled junk you can't uninstall like Movie Maker. Boots faster, much quicker hibernation/resume... and that is all. Bigger, slower, looks cheap and plastic.
First (and so far last) OS I bought with my own money. Well, as a separate purchase -- have bought a couple of laptops since then. So probably the last OS I'll ever pay for as a purchase of its own.
> NT 5.1, AKA "Windows XP": ... looks cheap and plastic.
There was a "Use Classic look" (or theme, whatever) check-box in the Control Panel that made it look like W95 / NT4 / W2K. Check, problem fixed. That hung around in Vista / W7 too.
> I preferred W2K.
I preferred W7 -- the early variants (but after that essential Service pack, 3 was it?), because after a while they started disabling some of the above-mentioned stuff in the Control Panel. And towards the end not even doing those changes directly in the Registry kept its effect after a reboot. :-(
> There was a "Use Classic look" (or theme, whatever) check-box
Not exactly, but you could select the unthemed theme, effectively turning themes off, then go into the Services management console and disable the Theming service.
But it was extra work, and most people didn't do it.
In a world where people curate collections of classic icons, e.g.
... and discuss looks and themes, and GNOME >=40 tries to disable theming, I think it's relevant and legitimate to point the finger at the point the rot set in to the extent that Windows itself adopted themes as standard. As well as them not being very good themes.
(Come back NeXTstep, all is forgiven. NeXT was right: greyscale is adequate for classic beauty.)
> I preferred W7
A different thing, I think.
XP is what drove me off Windows. (I should be grateful for that.) But I tried it last year and to my shock I liked it:
Since Vista, the resource footprint of Windows hasn't changed massively. Win7 is Vista point one. Win8 is Vista point two, which makes 7.1 either Vista point 2.1 or point 3.
10 is a bit bigger but it's really 8.1 cleaned up. Call it NT 6.4 or 6.5.
I haven't dug deep into 11 -- I detest it -- but it's only a .1 really.
> the early variants (but after that essential Service pack, 3 was it?)
> Not exactly, but you could select the unthemed theme, effectively turning themes off, then go into the Services management console and disable the Theming service.
Is that what I did? Maybe. If that whole "Theming" thing arrived in XP or Vista, I must have been disabling that as just a one-click preliminary to going into the basic "Appearance" Control Panel item -- the same dialog where you'd set border widths, background colours, and menu fonts since Windows 95 (or possibly a sub-dialog thereof, "Advanced" or something) -- to click "use [Classic | Windows 2000 | NT4 | Windows 95 | whatever] look", and then customise it from there, just like in W95. This latter is the only bit I recall with any certainty.
> > the early variants (but after that essential Service pack, 3 was it?)
> No idea what this means. Win7 never even got to SP2.
No, duh, you're right -- I must have gotten it mixed up with XP; that only really stabilised after SP3, didn't it?
So there was no such cut-off for 7; that was functionally fine from the start -- but then after some diffuse amount of time got progressively worse in terms of UI backward compatibility. Which is why I prefer some unspecified "early" iteration of it.
So far, fortunately, I've managed to avoid W11, except for a couple of months at the job I had in the end of 2022. But, sigh, I suppose it can't be avoided forever... :-(
I don't know! The 2 part thing is necessary if you want the performance back. If you only care about it looking like older versions, and don't object to wasting a few hundred MB and a few % of CPU, you don't need to disable the service.
My guide on this is a blind friend of mine, and he is super extra fussy plus plus about system responsiveness and wants the maximum possible performance. :-)
> If that whole "Theming" thing arrived in XP or Vista
There are 2 different things.
XP introduced themes, but they are effectively 2D textures on the old GDI display server.
Vista replaced the GDI with Aero, a compositing window manager that uses a 3D card to render textures onto flat window objects -- a method taken from Apple's Quartz Extreme display server, and also now used in most Linuxes as well. That's how come Vista brought transparency effects in: it's the GPU compositor doing that.
Side-effect: console windows can no longer be toggled to/from full-screen with Alt+Enter. Which was very useful for cleaning up screen corruption, but is rarely needed any more.
> I must have been disabling that as just a one-click preliminary to going into the basic "Appearance" Control Panel item
[Nod]
> No idea what this means. Win7 never even got to SP2.
No, duh, you're right -- I must have gotten it mixed up with XP; that only really stabilised after SP3, didn't it?
[Wiggles head]
SP3 was a big one and the OS at least got a fair bit less insecure after it. That's when the Windows Firewall appeared, IIRC.
> So there was no such cut-off for 7; that was functionally fine from the start
Yeah, but it was just a point-release of Vista, really.
There isn't a lot of difference between Vista + SP1 and Win7. But it had its bad reputation before the SP and never lost it.
> got progressively worse in terms of UI backward compatibility
Oh, my, yes, agreed.
> Which is why I prefer some unspecified "early" iteration of it.
Fair.
> So far, fortunately, I've managed to avoid W11, except for a couple of months at the job I had in the end of 2022. But, sigh, I suppose it can't be avoided forever... :-(
Nope. But I think a community will try to keep 10 alive as long as it can.
W11 feels to me like "Windows for people who don't really know how to use Windows", but then, Office 2007 and all successive versions felt the same: Office for people who don't know how to use Office.
I do know Office. Especially Word, to a less extent Excel. 2007 broke it and it's never got any better.
So I stopped using Office, except for old versions of Word, because LibreOffice doesn't have an outliner.
I still remember the day my father installed Windows 3.1, pure magic. I have never used any GUI OS before that (that was DOS and then we went straight for Win 3.1).