I wanted to like NT4 so much. It was the only version of Windows I could afford to buy once I bought the hardware I wanted. But it was so difficult to use.
It looked like Win95 but it didnt work like Win95 at all, it was fundimentally useless for most of what I wanted to do and remained that was for years, even as the SPs stacked up it didnt get much better.
Its no wonder its a forgotten OS in the retro community much like Windows Powered on the Win2k OS.
Great memories of it but it was hard work!

I only casually used it.
It wasn't bad - and compared with the DOS-and-Win3-bundle-in-disguise slop that Win9x was, the NT was even a true revelation.

But the cost was heavy...
It didn't really make sense with less than 64 MB RAM.
And there was plenty of hardware that never got NT support - eg. the original GUS series.

Overall, I preferred OS/2 - about the same features as NT, and lighter.

NT4 was quite lightweight from my dim recollections.

The main issues were 'No DirectX better than kindasorta 5', 'absolutely no plug and play', and 'USB support? Ha!'

Win2k fixed all those, and was my daily driver for a very long time.

windowsn't

NT 4.0 is only slightly younger than me and I'm not sure when I became aware of it. Some aspects are unusual, eg. there's no Device Manager, but it already has Task Manager.

Sometime in last couple of years, I played through Interstate '76 on it, GDI windowed mode (not like much else would work on VMware...) - after fixing it to not quit due to one GDI function return value difference and the most critical heap corruption bug.

Happy Birthday NT 4! 🎂

I've had a box copy when Windows 98 was still current.
To me, NT 4 is the counterpart to OS/2 Warp 4.
Both were such a relief in a time when stability wasn't to be taken for granted.
Also, both had good 32-Bit support and Win16 backwards compatibility.

Too compromised for me back then as a home/games user, however cool the technology might have been. What mattered is what you could do with it, which for me was not enough that was useful. If it was more stable for business I didn't notice at the time. I did often needlessly run multi-boot systems - sometimes including NT4 but most often not - because that become a game in itself.

2000 was another matter entirely, I held off from moving to XP as long as I could. I find NT4 a bit like 95: it was the route to something much better NT4->2000 and 95->98, no desire to revisit.

Back in 1997 I worked at a computer education training center.
we use to teach WindowsNT 4.0 workstation and server classes.
We used Pentium-90 and pentium-100 cpu computers.

I helped built and setup a server to remotely install the operating systems every week.
With a hard drive image of everything needed to teach the class
These hard drive images where loaded with all the programs, software, and docs
Needed to teach the class.

It was really cool.
In less than 5 minutes I could perform a network install of over 60 computers. ( two classrooms ).
It only took 3 clicks of the mouse to install over 60 computers.
What was really cool was after the installs completed all the computers
Would reboot almost simultaneously and play the WindowsNT startup sound.
It was so loud it would echo in the hall ways and disrupt the other classes
Being taught.

Pretty cool tech for 1997.

NT4 is much lighter in terms of RAM and disk space than Win2000 is. Unfortunately, the hardware and software support is also considerably less. It's a nice option for desktops of a certain era. Not being able to go into standby is a notable drawback for running NT4 on laptops though.

NT4 could run the registered versions of Opera, and then Opera 9 which was the best browser until web developers sabotaged everything.

Never had a soft spot for NT 4.0 myself but it was very stable. Only used it at customer sites back then. It was more of a corporate OS in my opinion. Can't remember many people using it privately. Used Windows 95/98 personally because of drivers, gaming etc. Even now I don't have it installed on any of my retro pc's. But it was definitely a milestone as it laid the foundation for Windows 2000 etc.

I remember getting a copy of NT 4.0 back in '96. I got a copy off eBay for around $100. The boot floppies didn't come with it, but I found that I could create the boot floppies using WINNT.EXE. I was still using an Intel 486DX/4 100MHz CPU and only had 18MB of RAM and an 850MB hard drive. Needless to say, it did not perform very well. My biggest disappointment was that I thought I'd still be able to run my DOS games but more stably. However, games that made use of the system's timer (like Mortal Kombat 1) wouldn't play at all.

A few years later I installed it on a faster system (I don't remember the specs) and it performed well and was very stable. There just wasn't too much software out there designed for it unless you were building a dual-CPU video editing workstation.

It wasn't a bad Operating System. It just fell short. It was released like 9 months after NT 3.51 and it seems like it was rushed so as to get the Win95 interface bolted onto the NT line.

Back in 1990’s WindowsNT was King among corporate and business computers.
It Ran e-commerce in USA and Nation Wide Networks

Mostly because if NTFS, Network and Security features.

Windows95 and Windows98 would Choke and crash were WindowsNT was more Reliable and Dependable
Could support Multi Processors and more RAM.