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> [...] and it required a massive PC to run at all -- a Pentium with 16MB was entry level [...].

Minimum was a 386 (12 MB RAM, 16 MB RAM for the ASE); seems the recommended minimum for NT 3.5 (Workstation/Server) according to German trade press of the time (c't, 1994) was a 486. If that made sense given NT's widely reported sluggish performance is another story.

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Back in the mid-1990s, my personal home file server was an IBM PS/2 Model 80, the highest end 80386DX IBM offered: 25MHz, and a tiny bit of L1 cache on the motherboard. I ran NT Server 3.51 on it.

Yes, it worked. As a server, it was perfectly usable and rock solid. I used it for years and it never ever crashed.

But I never logged into the console. NT 3.x ran on a 386 but you would not want to use it as a desktop computer.

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