RE: Winblows

Joe Barrera (joebar@microsoft.com)
Sat, 29 Mar 1997 08:31:14 -0800


From: Rohit Khare [SMTP:khare@w3.org]

> Why, oh, why do I still use this shitcan OS Win95 when
even the M$
> lovers among us cry out NT4.0?

I don't know, but you might want to seek professional help. A deep
seated urge to hurt yourself in this way should not be ignored.

Yes, there is no power management for NT. And that sucks. But it's no
excuse for running Win95.

On the other hand...

In the past couple days I've had the joy of setting up Windows for
Workgroups (aka Windows 3.11) on an old 486SX/25 laptop (4MB, 120MB
disk), to test down-level client support of some of the clustering stuff
I'm doing. WOW, something that makes even Win95 look good. It's amazing
that anyone ever thought that cooperative threading was a good idea.
(It's even more amazing that MacOS still ships with it, but that's
another story.) Nonetheless it's somewhat amusing making an otherwise
totally useless piece of hardware somewhat useful, by adding old
versions of Office and SQL Server client utilities and VC++ 1.5 and so
forth. (BTW, does anyone know, is there any Unix + X windows combination
that runs decently in four meg? If there is, please let me know. I
remember being in a world of hurt back at CMU when I tried running X and
Unix/Mach on an 8 MB IBM RT PC [remember those???].)

How did I join Microsoft in 1992 and yet never deal with Windows 3.1?
Simple - I just ran pre-release NT 3.1. Many of the pre-releases of NT
are very stable. I was running pre-release NT 4.0 months before NT 4.0
shipped. I've not yet moved to NT 5.0 but I probably will in a couple of
months.

- Joe

Joseph S. Barrera III (joebar@microsoft.com)
http://research.microsoft.com/~joebar
Phone, Redmond: (206) 936-3837; San Francisco: (415) 778-8227
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