Reply 100 of 132, by the3dfxdude
VivienM wrote on 2024-12-07, 17:20:The constraint being prices on hardware!
e.g. my family bought a 486 with 4MB of RAM in Jan. 1995. Upgraded to 8MB to be able to properly use Office 4.2 in April or so - cost, $250CAD. Upgraded to 95 on Aug. 24, it ran fine enough with the 8 megs of RAM. Eventually upgraded that machine again to 20 megs when the RAM prices had dropped quite a bit two years later or so. By that point it was trying to run Netscrape 4.0...
I don't know if that Cyrix 486DX2/50 would have been okay from a CPU performance standpoint for NT 3.51 (or the next year's NT 4), but you'd probably have needed 16MB of RAM. Two slots of memory, you'd probably be looking at $1000CAD in RAM.
I wouldn't have suggested to buy NT 4.0 for a PC that predated Win95. That would be strange to buy an OS and not get use out of it because you didn't budget the hardware upgrade.
People upgraded PCs with RAM too -- 9x or NT. They knew what they were getting into. Or they got someone to help them. I supported home users essentially without much money to burn, no one spent $1000 just on RAM, but yet there were PCs with NT around, so something is not quite right about what you are saying. Maybe for the early 90's for that much RAM, not late 90's.
I have PCs sitting right here from work I did in those days. One that ran NT4 and another that ran Win98. They are essentially the same. So you must not be familiar with NT in those days. All I can say is usually the release of the Microsoft OS came with a bump of system requirements. So upgrading was usually expected. These machines went out of service when 2000/XP came along, because they bought hardware for the new OS. It's what people did.
It was cool hearing and seeing NT4 in action when it was the current version. But I never used it at home. Yes, people liked it for being stable. It was the future arrived, and Microsoft was promising that it would be the main kernel very shortly, so it was a turning point, even if it wasn't meant for everyone yet due to Microsoft's rollout plan, it showed it was working and very viable.