On Monday, 9 April 2018 23:07:10 UTC+1, Vir Campestris wrote:
On 08/04/2018 03:29, tabbypurr wrote:

all versions of windows ran like that at least as far as Me.

Not quite correct.

MS ran two parallel Windows products for a while. There was the
DOS-based family, which started of with Windows 2 or something silly -
and yes, it really did run on a '286, but wouldn't IIRC run any programs
not specially written for it - and went through the well-known Windows
3.1, 95, 98 and ME. I may have missed one or two.

In parallel was Windows NT. This was a re-write from the ground up using
a microkernel, and was really solid at first. It was also portable,
running on Dec Alpha and Intel Itanium to my personal knowledge.

The reliability took a hit when they forced a 9x-style windows manager
onto it.

This is the product that became the Windows we know today.

BTW my carpenter's pencils are rectangular. But I have had them a long time.

Andy


Yes I was thinking only of win-dos, not win-nt. There was windows 1 as well.. 1, 2, 3.0, 3.1, 3.11, 3.2 in Chinese only IIRC, 95, 98, Me. And unofficial hybrids of 95/98/Me were rarely encountered. And I once had a lappie that was an odd hybrid of 3.1 & 95, but called itself 95. I gather this was an upgrade available before 95 released, it looked on the surface like 95 but was clearly a lot less developed.

FWIW there were also never released versions of 95 such as Windows 93 & Chicago with no net browser, but they were both stages of evolution that ended up as 95.


NT