Indeed. I remember running Windows 95 on a 32MB machine and stayed on Windows 95 even after 98, 98SE, ME, 2000 were released simply because that's what worked well on the machines I had at the time. IRRC I had a P166MMX with 32MB of RAM from 1997 which remained my main machine for some years. Win95 only needed the correct drivers for the newer post-1995 hardware. I ended up skipping 98, 98SE, ME, 2000 and going straight to XP for my next upgrade at some point in the early 2000's as I had acquired a new machine which couldn't run Windows 95 without a whole lot of patches and Firefox eventually dropped support for Windows 95. By then the hardware I had was good enough that XP worked fine.

> I think you need to understand that most people maybe had 16~32MB of system RAM on average circa 1999, while Windows 2000 ideally wanted at least a staggering 128MB as just a sysreq recommendation.

I do understand. I was there. My personal PCs from that time had 16MB (a getting old AMD 5x86 133) and 32MB (Celeron 300A w/ the 450Mhz "mod"), and I ran Linux and Windows 95/98 on them. I didn't get W2K at home until late 2001 and that was only because I splurged.

Windows 2000 was a ridiculous luxury item for home users at the time, but for business PCs it was a real winner. It was so much more stable than Windows 95/98. The "we build PCs" shop I worked at did a good job of convincing business Customers to spend the extra money for stability. Only a minority bit on the idea, but people definitely talked about seeing fewer reboots and better multitasking w/ the W2K machines. It helped sell itself.

(We also did least-privilege user accounts all the way back in the NT 4.0 days. "Cleaning up" the malware of the day was so easy because, by and large, you could just blow away the user's profile and start with a fresh registry. Since the user didn't have Administrator rights making machine-wide changes was "off limits" for most malware of the time.)

> Windows 98 was fine with 16MB minimum or even 8MB with some wizardry.

I ran Win95 in 1995 for a few months on 4MB of RAM.

> most people maybe had 16~32MB of system RAM on average circa 1999

For old computers maybe. I never actually heard of anyone doing an upgrade-install of Windows though.

I had 64MB in ... probably 1998 and we weren't even a computer-focused household. And your second link seems to back that up ("early 1999"), and that was a major improvement that basically obsoleted our old '95 computer but managed to last until well into the XP era ... huh, which is actually only the same 3 years apart, though we got SP1 which was a year after that.

It's kind of weird how Microsoft released a different OS each year for 4 years in a row.