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This was a great nostalgic read about the Era of computing that I cut my teeth on.

I owned the original IBM PC, running MS-DOS (although I also owned a copy of CP/M 86 that ended up being a dead end). Later, in the x386 and x486 Era I grudgingly used (and despised) Windows 95, because that's where all the good apps were at the time - except for games of course. REAL games ran in DOS

I did briefly use OS/2 at work, but like the article mentions, we were all using Windows apps in a virtual window under OS/2 because they ran better, and you had more choices.

However EVERYTHING changed when Window NT was released. That was a real Windows OS (not just a thin GUI over DOS) and I made it my primary OS for long time - the server version actually which was much more stable than the workstation version (yeah, I played thousands of hours of Counter Strike under Windows NT Server). Then eventually Windows 2000 (only because Microsoft screwed us and never really delivered proper USB support for Windows NT that they had promised). Never used Win98 much except on a laptop.

https://arstechnica.com/information-tec ... dy-of-os2/

I loved Counter Strike. Never considered playing it on NT. LOL
Win 98 was actually extremely stable for me. I didn't let it go until XP was stable. Skipped ME like all the other wise people did. lol

It was actually a bit of a hack to get games to work in NT. Especially the Server version. It didn't have many of the necessary APIs installed required for games, like DirectDraw. There was a whole community of people that had guides on how to manually install everything you needed.

The reason we all loved NT (and later Win 2000) is for the greatly improved polling rate of the keyboard and mouse. It made a big difference if you played seriously.

I spent so many years running Win2000. That was the real windows to me.