In the subsequent months/years with NT 4, the situation did not improve. It was a sad day when they replaced the HP/UX section of the lab with more NT machines. They were faster but they crashed a lot. It really took until Vista before NT was reliable.
Most notably: graphics and printer drivers, which are not typically written the highest standard.
Big iron vendors don't really have that problem, since they typically control their hardware as well. Microsoft had to rely on component vendors to provide driver software and couldn't plausibly test all permutations under all conditions (even though they test very, very many).
>> At the same time that you were experiencing blue screens
>>> first time I used Windows NT 4
For the 3.11/95 period, I was talking about NT 3.51 not 4.
Yes, NT 4 had well known issues with poor quality graphics drivers. For this reason many of us stayed with 3.51 until the graphic driver problems were ironed out.
You can cherry pick unstable OS's from any time period. But there is nothing special about today's OS's or programs. I've seen DOS, multiple forms of UNIX in the 80's and 90s that are just as stable as today's Win 10 or OS X.
The only reason why Windows was so buggy for you is that you were using the home editions. At the same time that you were experiencing blue screens in Win 9x. My NT workstation was rock solid without any of the issues you described.