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Comment by markus_zhang | Hacker News Reader

They definitely managed to create a lot of reliable products.

Windows NT was one of them. Up to Windows XP the products were pretty solid and each had visible improvement against the previous one.

Their language products were/are still solid IMO. Maybe Visual Studio is sluggish, but we can still use an older version if we want. Plus they put a lot of effort optimizing VSCode, too.

Even back in the MS-DOS/16-bit Windows days, when things broke down quite easily, I think they still provide the best bang for individual users and developers. There was no competitors who could provide so much value back then.

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> They definitely managed to create a lot of reliable products. > Windows NT was one of them.

Disagree. I was admining NT4.0 boxes back then and it was

1. very slow

2. constantly leaking that required weekly scheduled reboots

3. security wise it was nightmare even by that times standard

Thanks for sharing. It was that bad back then? As a consumer user the stability brought by the NT kernel was great back then, but maybe enterprise wise it was a different story? I never worked as a sys admin so can't say.

For the last point what was the golden standard back in the mid-late 90s, if we don't include mainframe/minicomputers? Was it Solaris or BSD?

Now that I think about it, I feel sad that I do not have the technical prowess to compare operating systems :/

Beside the NT4 servers we had SunOS 5.x and Digital UNIX (later upgraded to Tru64 UNIX). Yes, from sysadmin point of view they were way more consistent performance wise and less problematic to operate in general. BSDs were not 'approved' but nonetheless we were running DNS and some other internet facing stuff on OpenBSD 2.x if I remember correctly.

reliable? Windows is the only operating system you have to constantly reinstall because it gets slower after a few months. To the point people think it's totally normal to do that!

At least they are reliable in/after the Windows 2000/XP/7 era? Even as I don't like Windows 10, I haven't reinstalled it for years.

Back then the other options for home computers are just too technical for normies. I tried to install Linux back in early 2000 and I couldn't even get through the install process. Skill issue for sure, but if I couldn't do it back then I'm sure none of my class mates could.

Wait. That's not normal?

My WSL instances end up getting overwritten when I reinstall Windows so I thought that was just a general OS thing...

No, that's not normal.

Every bare-metal Linux system I have in my home is upgraded in-place. My oldest is roughly twenty years old. My newest is around four years old.

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