Advantages and disadvantages of Windows NT 3.1

One interesting and rare feature of NT was the ability to use more than one processor. In that, it was much better than the early dual PPC Macs running MacOS classic, which used one processor as a slave to offload computation from the main one.

NT also offered the same UI as Windows 3 (Windows 3 and 3.1 were OK, but Windows for Workgroups was the first really nice 16-bit Windows).

One issue with OS/2’s Windows compatibility is that Microsoft had to license Windows from Microsoft, so an OS/2 that could run Windows programs was more expensive than a “pure” one. Even though Windows NT is profoundly different from 16-bit Windows, it kept the same APIs, so. OS/2 exposed the differences to the apps running in user mode.

In the NT class, native USB support first appeared in Win2k.

That said, I recently got a USB mouse working in a NT 4.0 box (it was controlling a gas chromatograph or some such thing).