NT4 was more stable, to a point. But it had it's serious annoyances.
IP address change? Reboot. I can't remember other scenarios, but there was a lot of <settings change, reboot> in NT4.
Graphics and print drivers? Moved from user space (NT 3.5, 3.51) to kernel space -- and oh boy, graphics card vendors SUCKED at writing drivers (printer manufactures never improved to this day, hence the elimination of vendor print drivers). BSOD city.
NT4 was also hobbled as a desktop OS for consumers due to only supporting up to DirectX 3.
But! It was super popular for CAD/CAM/3D modeling. FireGL cards. 3DLabs cards. Yissss those were awesome monsters.
It also required a hefty 16MB RAM but as with all minimum system requirements from Microsoft, it really shined on 32MB+.
This is one of the reasons we had Windows 9x -- memory was too expensive to run NT4.
One of my favorite Microsoft-led NT4 (and SQL Server) proving grounds was TerraServer [0][1].
I miss the days of NT4. Computing was much more interesting and varied.
> It also required a hefty 16MB RAM but as with all minimum system requirements from Microsoft, it really shined on 32MB+.
This is just me going down memory lane, but my aunt gave me her corporate Toshiba laptop with NT4 back in 1996 since she hated the idea of working from home back then. I made friends with a kid who brought his dad's work laptop to school with similar specs and it always ran blazingly faster, always wondered why. I remember my aunt's laptop had 16mb of RAM. Thanks for clearing this up :)
That Terraserver wiki article has my head spinning a bit. Crazy how time flies.
IP address change? Reboot. I can't remember other scenarios, but there was a lot of <settings change, reboot> in NT4.
Graphics and print drivers? Moved from user space (NT 3.5, 3.51) to kernel space -- and oh boy, graphics card vendors SUCKED at writing drivers (printer manufactures never improved to this day, hence the elimination of vendor print drivers). BSOD city.
NT4 was also hobbled as a desktop OS for consumers due to only supporting up to DirectX 3.
But! It was super popular for CAD/CAM/3D modeling. FireGL cards. 3DLabs cards. Yissss those were awesome monsters.
It also required a hefty 16MB RAM but as with all minimum system requirements from Microsoft, it really shined on 32MB+.
This is one of the reasons we had Windows 9x -- memory was too expensive to run NT4.
One of my favorite Microsoft-led NT4 (and SQL Server) proving grounds was TerraServer [0][1].
I miss the days of NT4. Computing was much more interesting and varied.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraserver.com
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/the-mic...