All of these were successful releases, but we’ve also had some real clunkers as well. Some of these were early versions of technologies that were to be exploited in more refined iterations, later on, not yet ready for prime time. But some of these were just plain… bad. We’ve presented these OS disasters chronologically – not in the order of how much they suck. Did we miss anything? And if we were to sort these by reputation – from bad to worst – what would the correct sort order be? Talkback below to let us know. The press universally hated it because of performance-related issues and a lack of resources for new users. In addition, most PCs at the time couldn’t run it because their hardware specifications weren’t powerful enough. But hey, it was a 1.0 product. However, Windows 386 had significant stability issues. For example, its memory manager was incompatible with DOS memory managers, such as QEMM or the DOS Extenders needed by applications such as Lotus 1-2-3, the most popular spreadsheet. So that meant that if you wanted to use those apps, you would need a boot floppy and need to reboot into DOS to run them. It’s inconceivable now that end-users put up with this stuff, but we did. You also couldn’t page out to virtual disk if you started to run out of memory. Some of these issues were rectified in Windows 3.0, which followed in 1990. Windows NT was a native protected mode, multiprocessor-capable, multithreaded, multiuser, processor architecture-independent, true preemptive multitasking OS, but it needed to run Win32 apps written specifically to take advantage of those features. 16-bit Windows apps from Windows 3.1 could run on it, but they ran slowly and not very well – and DOS compatibility was horrible. In addition, Windows NT 3.1 was expensive (the workstation version was $500), had substantial minimum hardware requirements for the time (a 386 processor and 12MB of memory), and ran best on non-Intel systems such as DEC Alpha and the MIPS. It included updated versions of Internet Explorer and Windows Media player, which were add-ons for Windows 98 and Windows 95. While this sounded good on paper, Windows Me was heavily panned because it was unstable, lacked support for legacy real-mode apps that previous versions had, and did not exploit modern PC hardware the way Windows 2000, the business OS Microsoft was shipping at the time, did. It wasn’t until about a year later that the NT-based Windows XP shipped, which became the most successful version of Windows in history. While Vista gets a bad rap, many of the architectural changes introduced still exist in modern versions of Windows today, and Windows 7, one of the most successful Windows releases, is essentially a cleaned-up, streamlined Windows Vista. Microsoft tried to unify the Windows 8 interface with Metro on desktops and tablets, and even Windows Phone, but it didn’t catch on. Live Tiles persisted in Windows 10 less prominently and are being unceremoniously ripped out in Windows 11. These Intel chips shipped beginning in August 2016 and are still sold in retail channels, including Microsoft’s Surface Studio systems. Unfortunately, so many PCs will be left out. To quote ZDNet columnist David Gewirtz, the affected systems will “become the walking dead.” Ready or not, Windows 11 is on target to leave stranded hundreds of millions of systems on Windows 10 – which will still be supported until January of 2025. The sheer amount of bad will created by a software upgrade that essentially doesn’t seem like much more than a user interface update is rubbing many Microsoft diehards the wrong way.
