this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2024
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Yeah maybe I was thinking of NT 3.5.1. Whatever version it was, it was our first experience of a Windows version that was stable. It was a long time ago, my memory isn’t great. I think we were forced to develop on Windows 95 until we could get the NT licenses and hardware.
That would make more sense IMO. If you used Windows 95, It probably wasn't the original Windows NT, because that came out in 93 and was called NT 3.1.
Windows NT 3.5.1 came out in 95, I admit I looked it up to support my memory. I still didn't like 3.5.1 although it was better, Although it came out later the same year, I liked Windows 95, it finally got long filenames, which annoyed me tremendously that DOS/Windows didn't have before Windows 95. Obviously Windows NT 3.5.1 still lacked the ability to boot to console, and have a full set of tools to fix things when they went wrong. Also most games didn't work on NT. 😋
Windows NT 3.5 (and later 3.5.1) was far more stable than the desktop versions of Windows (Windows 3.11 and early Win95). If you need help remembering NT versions visually, NT 3.X still used progman.exe so it looked like Windows 3.1. Windows NT 4 was the first one to use explorer.exe (with the Start button) like Win95.
Win95 gold release was a hot mess of crashes and shaky drivers. The "stable" version of Win95 didn't arrive until OSR2 (aka Windows 95B).
Yes admittedly Windows 3.5.1 was more stable than DOS/Windows. But I still hated the design of it, and the lack of ability to boot into console in particular.
I'm thinking back to those times fixing broken NT 3.5 machines. I can't think of many times a console was needed that didn't have alternate methods to accomplish the same thing. There's really only two times I can think I'd need what we use a console for today.
display drivers wrong/bad - VGA mode existed for this where you could get a very ugly 640x480 16 color display that worked on all VGA cards irrespective of driver. You could get into the OS (even authenticate!) and make any changes to the OS needed.
mass storage controller change/ driver fix - Running through the setup again from floppies (F8 to use new driver) and you'd be back into the OS.
What else did you need a console for?
I think mostly for correcting config files, and because I didn't like VGA mode, it was a waste of time to have to boot into.
To read logs and disable drivers that caused problems.