[ryao]

> It runs on all versions of Windows, except Win95 and Win98.

For some reason, I suspect it does not run on Windows 1.0 to 3.11 either. I also find it strange to think it would run on both Windows ME and Windows NT 3.5, while excluding Windows 95 and Windows 98. Windows NT 3.5 and Windows ME are nearly a decade apart. The Windows subsystem’s software support in Windows NT 3.5 would be a subset of Windows 95/98.

[thingfish]

You're right. I'll change it to "Windows XP or later".

[bandrami]

IDK, I wouldn't be surprised if it ran on Windows 2000 (still the best OS Microsoft ever made)

[haglin]

Yeah, Windows 2000 was probably the best operating system Microsoft ever produced. It had no crashes, a snappy/intuitive/sleek user interface, and DirectX support for games. I am currently running Mac OS X because I never liked Windows XP/Vista/10/11.

In hindsight, the progress Microsoft made in the ten years between Windows 3.0 (1990) and Windows 2000 seems incredible. They transitioned from a 16-bit shell running on top of DOS to a fully-fledged operating system with a hardware abstraction layer, preemptive multitasking, permissions, a registry, proper device drivers etc.

Twenty-five years later, there has been basically no progress.

At a minimum, I would have expected something like the Knowledge Navigator

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umJsITGzXd0

[chungy]

> It had no crashes

Windows 2000 is my favorite release ever, but anecdotally, I can deny the "no crashes" claim. Sure it was rare, but I had my share of BSODs and weird behavior on it. Still much more solid than... pretty much every other release.

[jug]

I think since Windows 7, it has been very solid except for maybe third party kernel driver issues which needs direct kernel access out of necessity. Today when you have a BSOD, it’s like a Linux, Mach kernel panic etc - 99% likely to be a hardware problem.

[floxy]

CrowdStrike

[Borg3]

Yeah. It was indeed great, I was using for 10 years, then moved to Win2003 with I still use. But I think Win2003 is even better. It have better kernel, proper SMP support (multicore), good PAE support (16GB RAM), newer drivers, etc :)

[Aloha]

Why use something so… old?

[Borg3]

Because its snappy, have great GUI, I control it, I have all the tools for maintenance (compilers, DDK, disassemblers)..

I know, there pretty nice Linux distros that are lightweight and snappy too. One day... :) but not yet :)

[chasil]

Fans of SimH might give you many reasons for enthusiasm in retro-computing.

https://simh.trailing-edge.com/

[giancarlostoro]

They want to see if anyone will ever 0-day their system.

To be fair, I have old MacOS laptops that are my wife's laptops, we keep them around because they still turn on, and they have all her old files (I've backed it all up several different ways for her), but I never go on the web with any of the browsers installed on those systems.

[musicale]

> a fully-fledged operating system with a hardware abstraction layer, preemptive multitasking, permissions, a registry, proper device drivers etc.

Windows NT, which was developed by people (Dave Cutler et al.) who knew how to design and build operating systems (VMS, etc.).

[fuzztester]

there is a book about it, called "inside windows nt". I had read it back in the day,

it is by helen custer. it talks about dave cutler's work on it, apart from other stuff.

[p_ing]

Got a copy sitting right next to me! Along with Inside The Windows NT File System (and The Design and Implementation of the 4.4 BSD Operating System).

'Windows Internals' series is the successor to Inside Windows NT.

[cgannett]

I had a weird old "laptop" that I was given as a kid, didnt know jack about computers back then so I couldnt tell you what it was. It was one of those that came with a big heavy docking station and it couldnt run without it anymore so I assume the battery was dead. Had Windows 2000 and I used to play AoE 2 on it all day and it was smooth and the interface was snappy. Fond memories. I remember being really confused when people told me that Windows 2000 was bad.

[chasil]

Bear in mind that Microsoft was the largest commercial UNIX vendor in licensing XENIX for the TRS-80 Model 2 alone. From this experience, they had significant knowledge of 32-bit preemptive multitasking.

That exposure allowed them to see how valuable Dave Cutler's PRISM team would be in a total redesign in melding VMS and (whatever tolerable) UNIX features into a new kernel, but focusing it upon Win32.

There were OS/2 and POSIX emulation layers also, but these were obviously second class.

[signal11]

I love Windows 2000, it was pretty great, but display driver crashes would take down the system (similar to NT4). Also if 2000 was installed in most homes it’d be about as much of a fiasco as pre SP2 Windows XP. IIRC there were a bunch of worms that did affect Windows 2000.

Windows 10 on the other hand will deal with display driver crashes just fine, falling back to safe mode.

[fsckboy]

>In hindsight, the progress Microsoft made in the ten years between Windows 3.0 (1990) and Windows 2000 seems incredible.

compared to what, Linux? the BSDs? Solaris? OS/2 didn't achieve market success but it added major feature subsystems at the same brisk pace.

[heavensteeth]

right, I suspect "NT" is the category they're looking for.

[guerrilla]

What's wrong with 2003?

[bayindirh]

Windows 2000 was not developed for x86 directly. It first started on Alpha, then ported to x86, so its codebase is "double-brewed" in a way.

I also remember 2000 as the only rock solid Windows release, and I never had to reinstall it. XP was very close to that after it fully matured, but nothing feels like 2000.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_2000

[adra]

The two OS kernels and API are super close (outsider perspective). I used win2k for like 10 years mostly on the back of applications and games supporting XP for so long. I can't recall the big API differences. Maybe XP has UAC and there were APIs to check for it? Anyways, I still have fond memory of manually patching out API calls hard coded into EXEs to bypass XP only parts which were almost always superfluous.

[bayindirh]

Yes, I'm aware. Normally they shouldn't behave wildly differently, but the new GUI and userspace features made the system a bit flaky at first. Also, XP became a bit more finicky about drivers over the years, and this broke stuff, too.

2000s kernel was one of its better features, but lack of blingy GUI was also helping in its stability IMHO.

[creatonez]

True, but the flexibility that two attempts at porting to botched architecture introduced also resulted in 2003 becoming Microsoft's first x86-64 operating system. The very next day after the 2003 release, they released Windows XP Professional x64 Edition based on the 2003 codebase, which a user could run on their brand new x64 computer without much of an issue -- that is, if they had even heard of it... it was under-marketed because they needed to save the hype for Vista. So the struggle and failure may have been worth it in the grand scheme of things.

[chungy]

That's not really quite accurate. Windows NT began life on the i860, and then was ported to i386 and MIPS, and very shortly after the initial release, ported to Alpha. A year after that, PowerPC.

Through the life of Windows NT 4.0's life span, MIPS and PowerPC died early, and Alpha support was axed just before the very end. In Windows 2000's development, i386 and Alpha were the only ports left, and Alpha was axed before it could make it to final release.

x86 and Alpha lived simultaneously for most of its development. It wasn't done "first" on Alpha (quite the opposite).

[tomrod]

It's worse than 2000, IMO, bloated and not super stable like 2000.

Using Windows 2000 is like using a well-crafted Linux distro. Things just work.

[yellowapple]

If Microsoft had just iterated on Windows 2000 forever instead of continuing with XP/2003 and beyond it's quite possible I wouldn't be a Linux desktop user today.

[actionfromafar]

A bit bloated. I think NT 3.51 is the coolest, extremely stable.

[chuckadams]

The NT 3.x series might have had stricter userspace separation than 4.x did where they moved things like GDI into kernel space, but it still fell over hard at even the faintest whiff of fuzz-testing the native API. It wasn't until 5.x (Win2K) that they started taking that sort of thing seriously.

[tomrod]

Hilarious that this was literally my exact thought.

[dimava]

Also you are confusing Visual Studio and VSCode

[tomrod]

Win2k?

[zoobab]

"later" is for lazzy developers.

Better list the complete list of versions where it has been tested, like "Windows XP/7/8/10/11"...

[zoobab]

The frontpage says now:

"It runs on Windows NT, version 2003/XP/Vista/7/8/10/11."

Victory!

[NikkiA]

It might run on 3.1 and 3.11 via win32s, there were occasional odd things that would run on the win32 subsystem as was adapted to 3.1/3.11, but not 95/98/ME.

[skissane]

> It might run on 3.1 and 3.11 via win32s

It won't. I see lots of calls to CreateThread/etc in the source. Win32s didn't support threads.

[JdeBP]

ryao's above proposition is the converse, that only Win32s in DOS+Windows ME was adequate to running this, and that the prior Win32s in DOS+Windows 98 and DOS+Windows 95 was not.

To be honest, though, I very much doubt that anyone has fully tested either that claim or what the headlined article itself claims. A quick look at the source turns up things that require the full Windows NT security model, wide character versions of the API, and threads.

It probably does not run on any version of DOS+Windows, and "except Win95 and Win98" in the headlined article is likely a fumbled way of saying that, which didn't account for those not being the only versions of DOS+Windows that exist.

[skissane]

> ryao's above proposition is the converse, that only Win32s in DOS+Windows ME was adequate to running this, and that the prior Win32s in DOS+Windows 98 and DOS+Windows 95 was not.

Win32s was for Windows 3.x only

Win32 for 9x/Me was originally called Win32c, but then Microsoft renamed it to just plain Win32, despite the fact that name was shared by the much more complete NT-based implementation.

[gwbas1c]

I wish there was a date on that page.

Today in 2025, "It runs on all versions of Windows, except Win95 and Win98" comes across as a poetic way to say "we make an effort to support older computers running older versions of Windows."