It feels like NT4, with 2000 on top of it, then a layer of XP, then Vista, then 7, then 8, then 10, and, finally, 11.
It’s not uncommon to do something that lands me on a dialog box I still remember from Windows NT 3.1. The upside is that they take backwards compatibility very seriously, probably only second to IBM.
Like the services control panel that’s still 30% white space, a useless “extended” tab and doesn’t save any of the location or style data. It’s the best.
You can still run 50 year old games on your newest IBM Z16 mainframe. Microsoft is just a baby in this business. If you have a Unisys Clearpath boxes, you can even get get some 60 year old games running, provided you can read the punchcards ;-)
Fun fact: Unisys Clearpath today is just x86 boxen emulating the old Burroughs CPU architecture. You can even deploy Clearpath instances to AWS. And they still run Mr. High and Mighty Master Control, too.
To answer your other comment: yes, the MCP from Tron was named after the Burroughs/Unisys OS. Bonnie MacBird, the screenwriter for Tron, is the wife of Alan Kay, who served as technical consultant, and she dropped references both to himself (Alan Bradley) and his areas of interest (Kay loved the Burroughs architecture and in particular its tagged-memory features) in the script for the movie.
Interesting to learn the real MCP was nearly as hostile as its fictional namesake.
It continued as 6.1, 6.2 and 6.3 for Windows 7, 8, and 8.1. But the NT kernel revamped for Windows 10. And they aligned the version numbers at that point. Windows 10 and 11 are both NT 10. The kernel has many differences within 6.x let alone the big leap to 10.
There have been iterative substantial improvements to the NT architecture since Windows 2000 and later with Vista (where the UAC model started, rather poorly).
Really? Windows2000 (which was based on NT) hit the sweet spot for me. Anything earlier than that seemed too buggy, and from there onward just seemed to devolve into a bloated mess of unrequested "features". (The very reason why I have been using Linux for 20+ years now as a matter of fact.) But yeah to be completely fair I suppose not everything they have produced since has been crap. There have been some innovations here and there...
