> And that compatibility problem was still a hard one for Microsoft to deal with, remember that NT was not ubiquitous until Windows XP despite being a massive improvement.
I think when it comes to this it is best to remember the home computing landscape of the time, and the most important part: DRAM prices.
They were absurdly high and NT4/2000 required more of it.
My assumption is Microsoft would have made the NT4/2000 jump much quicker if DRAM prices were driven in a downward direction.
PC gaming was, back then, still very DOS-centric. It wasn’t until the late 90s that games started to target Windows. And even then, people still had older games they wanted supported.
I'd say both. IIRC the DOS story was better under OS/2 than NT, but the RAM requirements were higher (at least until XP).
To add a third prong: hardware support was a big issue too as it is for any consumer OS, with legacy hardware being an issue just as it can be today if not more so. This hit both NT and OS/2 similarly.
NT 4 had NTVDM and it worked well enough. Quake 1, command and conquer, sim games for DOS and a bunch of other stuff worked just fine. You'd run into issues with timing on crappier games or some games that talked directly to soundcards I forget what the details were but you'd just not have audio.
I had a gravis ultrasound at the time and remember having to cut the reset signal line on the card.
I could then initialise the card in DOS and reboot into NT without it being reset and losing settings. Then some sketchy modified driver was able to use it.
I remember NT4 having problems with games that wanted to access SVGA resolutions and SoundBlaster. I kept a volume with Win98 back then specifically for the games.
Was very impactful in early days of 2000. Seeing 64 MiB "used up" by barely loaded NT5.0 beta/RC was honestly a sort of chilling effect. But prices shortly fell and 128MB became accessible option, just in time for Windows XP to nail Windows 9x dead
128MB was pretty common by the time Windows 2000 was released. I could afford it and I wasn’t paid well at that time.
Plus Windows ME wasn’t exactly nimble either. People talk about the disaster that was Vista and Windows 8 but ME was a thousand times worse. Thank god Windows 2000 was an option.
It got much better once the release date rolled in, but it was something I remember discussed a lot at the time among those who did use NT.
Also, at the time NT was still somewhat limited in official settings to pretty much rare more expensive places and engineering systems, with typical business user keeping to Windows 98 on "client" and NT Server domain controllers or completely different vendors, at least outside big corporations with fat chequebooks. Active Directory started changing it a lot faster, the benefits wer great and 2000 having hotplug et al was great improvement, but it took until XP for the typical office computer to really run on NT in my experience.
Let’s not forget that XP had twice the system requirements that 2000 did.
I think the main difference is really just that XP had a “Home” edition that came preinstalled on home PCs.
There’s no reason Microsoft couldn’t do that with 2000, and in fact I read that some stores did stock Windows 2000 instead of Windows Me (though this wasn’t something I personally witnessed).
I'm not talking about environments that could run Home Edition - one of the things MS disabled in Home was ability to join AD domains, something that was available on 9x.
From what I recall, an important point for releasing ME at all was that compatibility (both in applications and drivers) was not yet ready at the time of NT 5.0 going gold, leading to a stopgap solution being deployed.
NT4 was reasonably rarer due to hardware compatibility issues as well as software compatibility. Windows 2000 brought great change there, but it only really finished with the very soon after XP.
The organizations that really needed NT for various reasons (engineering software, SMP, higher security settings, etc.) did move as early as NT4, indeed. Also, non-trivial amount of Alpha workstations with NT4 (as well as Pentium Pro ones)
My understanding is that ME from a technological point of view was 98 with NT drivers. It probably was a critical step in getting vendors to make NT drivers for all of their screwball consumer hardware, and this made XP, the "move the consumers to the NT kernel" step a success. The lack of drivers is also what made XP 64 bit edition so fraught with peril, but xp-64/vista was probably critical for win7's success for the same reason.
I think when it comes to this it is best to remember the home computing landscape of the time, and the most important part: DRAM prices.
They were absurdly high and NT4/2000 required more of it.
My assumption is Microsoft would have made the NT4/2000 jump much quicker if DRAM prices were driven in a downward direction.