Hacker News Reader

steve1977

> We got rid of this phase with Windows XP release

I assume you were talking about consumer versions like Win 95, 98 and Me (the release we don’t talk about)?

The NT based ones like NT 4 and Windows 2000 seemed decent when they came out. I guess MS realized that as well and started using NT for the consumer releases as well with XP.

View on HN

The lack of unification between NT and Win9x before XP was abysmal. Basically you had to have 2 partitions, one for gaming, one for business. NT was unable to have games, Win9x was unable to be useful for business due to sheer blue screens. So yeah, I include NT 3.5, NT 4.0 and W2k in that shitty phase as well. I know it very well because I've lived through it. XP ended that. Hence why, after 20+years, you still have the majority of ATM's and plenty of other KIOSKs around the world still running XP.

I only ever used NT based systems, but then I also never used PCs for gaming, so I was probably „privileged“ in some regard.

But I certainly agree that XP was a nice release, as was Windows 7 (in my experience).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com