Advantages and disadvantages of Windows NT 3.1

(dfarq.homeip.net)

4 points | by birdculture 9 hours ago ago

4 comments

  • rbanffy 9 hours ago ago

    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.

    • karmakaze 5 hours ago ago

      Running the Netscape or Mozilla browsers would use up 100% cpu, so it was fantastic to have a dual-cpu system so that your system was still 100% responsive.

    • WarOnPrivacy 9 hours ago ago

      > One interesting and rare feature of NT was the ability to use more than one processor.

      I learned this the hard way in 1998. I built up a dual PII system and installed Win98. sigh

  • WarOnPrivacy 9 hours ago ago

    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).