Well, it's funny. NeXT was obviously a pretty great platform to develop for (others can speak to that more than I can) but the tools on the PC side at the time were pretty good. Borland and Microsoft were still in a legitimate competition to deliver good tools at a low cost. Delphi wasn't terrible.

The big problem was that Windows 95 was such a crippled platform. In a lot of cases you'd want to do your real development and debugging on an NT machine and simply target Windows 95. (it was not in any way, as someone else stated, a "DOS shell" but it was still pretty bad)

From a user point of view, well, a lot of people thought the NeXT environment was pretty great. Windows 95 was easy to use but it was just MSFT's first step out of the primordial ooze. I'm not sure how much difference it truly made if you spent your whole day in Photoshop or PageMaker or Mathematica or whatever, except you'd expect the Windows 95 machine to crash a lot more often.

Lack of user accounts meant we could kill user32.exe, that had to be followed up by a reboot.

It'd be interesting to go back and run some of the software from the Windows 95 era (and the OS) on a higher-quality machine. I and most of my friends were using low-quality 486s and Pentium clones and it's certainly possible a lot of the problems had to do with hardware quality.

I honestly remember the later Windows 98 experience as being almost crash-free, and since the architecture was basically the same a lot of that probably has to do with higher quality hardware (and better drivers, of course). That was the golden time of the Intel 440lx and 440bx and ECC RAM support on desktop motherboards, when just about every blue screen could be attributed to those newfangled AGP graphics accelerators...

If your PC is faster than a certain speed Win95 won't boot.

This bit us at VMware, since it was common to want to run old Win95-only software in a VM on fast machines. We ended up having the VMM (Virtual Machine Monitor) patch up the bug when it did binary translation.

> If your PC is faster than a certain speed Win95 won't boot.

That's interesting. What's the threshold there?

300Mhz. But you can work around that...

http://virtuallyfun.superglobalmegacorp.com/2011/01/10/windo...