[scholia]

Sorry, my mistake. I was inadvertently thinking of what Microsoft charged PC manufacturers for pre-installation. The retail copies included extra charges to cover boxes, discs, distribution, the retailer's margin, support, returns etc.

Unfortunately I can't find a list of Windows retail prices, but originally Windows was sold much like an application. That is, it assumed you already had DOS installed.

From what I recall, the official retail was something like $99 and you could pick up a copy for around $80 or so. (Some programs came bundled with a run-time copy of Windows, though you couldn't used that copy with a different application.)

Windows 95 upped the price because Microsoft was charging for both DOS and Windows at the same time. On that basis, something like $200 doesn't sound wrong, and that's around the price Windows has sold at ever since. (Unless, of course, you buy a pre-launch offer.)

Software and hardware prices were generally much higher in the old days, of course.

On stability, I found both NT4 and Windows 2000 to be very stable. With other versions, they were stable if they were correctly set up on decent hardware, you only used Microsoft drivers, you were pretty careful, and you restarted every day.

I could usably run Win98-XP for about week. I would never find out how long I could run NT4 because I was dual-booting it ;-)

Eggs are fragile, but they generally don't break if you handle them carefully. It was much the same with Windows...

[Fnoord]

Thanks for your comment. I don't agree with a lot you wrote, so I'll have to mostly agree to disagree.

You get 2 OS with Windows 9x? Really? Or is it that Windows 9x is just a GUI on top of DOS? At the very least its product tying.

One thing which stood out was how you excused the terrible stability of Windows 9x. For me the fragility of Windows 9x is unacceptable. What's worse is that a lot of people thought this was normal, acceptable behavior for computers. Millions of work hours have been wasted thanks to this instability. Back then Linux desktop had its fair share of issues which were also unacceptable, but instability wasn't one of them.

[mschaef]

> You get 2 OS with Windows 9x? Really? Or is it that Windows 9x is just a GUI on top of DOS? At the very least its product tying.

This is an interesting question...

Windows started out (early-mid 1980's) as a graphical layer on top of DOS (Sold separately). To DOS, Windows added memory management, device independent graphics, windowing, multiple processes, and a cooperative multitasking scheme that let the multiple processes run at the same time.

The next 10 years of history (through to Windows 95, 98, and Me) are then largely about Windows taking over more and more functionality from DOS.... but never quite supplanting it. If a Windows 3.1 system launched Windows at the end of DOS's autoexec.bat, Windows 95 did essentially the same thing, but internally and not in a script. (In fact, Andrew Schulman got Windows 95 running as DOS 7.0.)

So the way to view it is that this lineage of Windows is really a hybrid design, with elements of both DOS and Windows.

The Windows NT kernel and OS/2 >=2.0 are both totally different... to the extent they run DOS, they run it as a child process under a native 32-bit OS. (Not 64-bit because x86-64 doesn't support the V86 mode necessary to make virtual DOS machines run.)