Your story reminds me of when Microsoft acquired Hotmail in the '90s and they tried migrating from FreeBSD & Solaris onto Windows NT/IIS. Having the world's largest email service running on the Windows stack would have been a huge endorsement. It took years until they were successful.
While I don't disagree with that, in my experience all Windows instability on WinNT family (and I tightly worked with all end user versions of Win from 16 bit W3.11 to the recent Win11 with a very few exceptions) are caused by faulty hardware and/or bad drivers that can't handle it.
I don't think I could remember any issue that I can't attribute to bad HW/3rd party driver.
Wrt Win95 & it's kind - all processes in that family essentially run in a single address space, and data "isolation" were "achieved" only through obscurity. If you knew some magic constants that were easily obtainable from disassembly, you could do anything there. So no wonder it was as bad as the worst program you've installed..
Windows 2000 server was peak windows. All the subsequent versions just got harder to maintain as they gradually ruined the user interface. Nobody cares about the UI on consumer windows but if you’re spending a lot of time in RDP the vista based server products are terrible.
I don’t hate windows 2019 but Linux is better, easier, faster and a relief after any futile attempts to use IIS or sql server in 2025.
windows xp x64 edition was pretty slick; and so was NT4. I agree that 2000 was pretty cool, but perhaps a lot of that is design nostalgia. It was very "serious business OS" where XP and Me looked like jellybeans and cartoons. My favorite windows, though, is win 7 ultimate, Steve Ballmer Edition. i was sad when i had to upgrade to winten.
I get the nostalgia for XP, it was the first windows consumer edition that didn’t suck, but for a server OS 2000 was so lean and easy to manage it makes me wonder how MS lost to Linux. Back then, it was a genuine competition, now you’d have to be crazy to choose windows to deploy anything.
I wish MSFT could build Active Directory and the associated constellation of services on Linux. You can make a reasonable simulacrum with Samba but it isn't as well-integrated.
(My fever dream wish is for a "distribution" of NT that boots in text mode and has an updated Interix subsystem alongside Win32. Throw in ZFS and it would be awesome.)
I guess I misread you, then. I thought you were arguing that a text mode wouldn't be useful. That's why I suggested Server Core. It's CLI, but uselessly framed in a GUI framework.
Like I said in my earlier post, text mode NT is my fever dream fantasy. Maybe you were saying the same thing.
Yes, I was saying the same thing. There are very few applications we could run on a text-mode DOS/Linux-CLI type NT due to the upstream dependencies that require (or implement) a graphical interface.
Text-only mode would be wonderful even if all you could do is look at a blinking cursor.
Powershell was 2006, so I suppose the real "peak windows server UX" was 2016 when PS was relatively mature and came out-of-the-box with the latest version.
If MSFT had back ported servicing stack updates to 2016 it would still be usable. As it stands it bogs down unreasonably when applying updates and needs lengthy DISM /CleanupImage processes to be run periodically to reclaim disk space.
I went from 98 to 2000 (rather than ME) and it was an amazing experience. It showed me what an operating system could be like. Of course, what I really wanted was Linux, but I didn't know better at the time.
I dunno how to compare stable to stable but I ran Win2k for so long that I got bored with it (something like 5-7 years) and never experienced a single crash. This is coming from a Linux guy btw… so I’m no Microsoft fanboy, just saying, it was as stable as any other stable OS.
I saw years of uptime on those systems whereas Win2000 iirc needed a reboot for every single update of the OS, and even for applications like IIS or Exchange.
Compared to NT4 it was probably very stable, since I remember telling most clients to just shut it down Friday evening and boot it Monday morning cause the pre-SP4 NT4 could not stay up more than three weeks.
Compare that to AS/400, where we pushed updates all over the country, without warning clients, to system running in hospitals, and there never was even the slightest problem. It sounds irresponsible to do that today, but those updates just worked, all the time and all applications continued to work.
SQL Server is really Sybase tho, which was always capable of running on UNIX.
Can't say much more, but I worked on a huge (internal) Sybase ASE on Linux based app (you've _all_ bought products administered on this app ;) ) way back (yes, pre-SSD, multi path fiber I/O to get things fast, failover etc.) and T-SQL is really nice, as is/was ASE and the replication server. Been about 20 years tho, so who knows.
I worked with SQL Server a bit, writing a Rust client for it back in the days. The manual is really good, explaining the protocol clearly. That made it really easy to write a client for it.
SQL Server uses NT and Win32 APIs, so the SQL team built a platform independent layer. Meaning NT and Win32 is still used by SQL on Linux. It’s pretty cool tech.
I guess wording wise for my comment, the "Hah, they didn't actually write that themselves, they just bought the Sybase rights to everything license" got the better of me :)
To be fair again, from what I hear, SQL server at Microsoft did some nice things on top of Sybase but the base, T-SQL, is just nice overall and by itself. I really want to like Postgres (and I do) but some of the awesome things I had with actual Sybase ASE 20+ years ago, Postgres still does not have. And that was a piece of software that had those features I loved for 10+ years prior to when I started working with it. The app we're talking of here was 15 years old when I worked on it 20+ years ago and it's probably still around and very probably still uses Sybase ASE (tho the actual app was converted from Smalltalk to Java ;)
I also later on had to use Oracle and had the same "WTF? You can't do that?" experience :shrug:
The tone and content of this document is shockingly candid and frank. I think it did a ton to make Windows Server a better product. I have a lot of respect for the people at MSFT who reviewed the company's own product in such a critical light.
Of course. Why would you expect anything but? Pride is actually a very good driver of change if you ask me because people often do their best work when they are proud of what they are building.
The 90s were the dark ages of cloud computing. It was the age of system administrator, desktop apps, Usenet, and the start of the internet as a public service. At the time concepts such as infrastructure as code, cloud, and continuous deployment, were unheard of.
AWS, which today we take for granted, was launched on 2002, and back then it started as a way to monetize Amazon's existing shared IT platform.
Of course migrating anything back then was a world of pain, specially when it's servers running on different OSes. It's like the rewrite from hell, that can even cover the OS layer. Of course it takes years.
> At the time concepts such as infrastructure as code, cloud, and continuous deployment, were unheard of.
There existed different names and solutions for things like cloud. I worked with Grid Engine in 2000 after Sun acquired Gridware, but that project started in 1993. By 2000 we were experimenting with running Star Office on the grid and serving UI to thin clients (kind of what Google Docs or Office 365 do now, but on completely different stack).
https://www.zdnet.com/article/ms-moving-hotmail-to-win2000-s...
https://jimbojones.livejournal.com/23143.html