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> require near daily reboots.

This is true, but the thing is that was normal then.

It was the stuff of jokes:

"You know what the best thing about owning a Mac is? Something in your life will go down on you every single day."

Windows 3.x was the same, or even worse.

Windows 3.0 called them Unrecoverable Application Errors and I saw a T-shirt that read:

"I thought U.A.E. was a country in Arabia until I got Windows 3.0."

DOS didn't so much because it didn't multitask. Netware didn't because all it did was serve files. But in the 1980s, if a computer could run multiple apps at once, it crashed all the damned time.

Then came OS/2 2 which was a lot more solid -- not very at all by 21st century standards but visibly better -- and it was a revelation. You could run a multitasking GUI OS on your cheapo built-from-bits COTS PC and it just ran for days on end, using mainstream off-the-shelf software. And it was always under massive load, because in 1992 a decent PC was a 386 with 4MB of RAM, VGA, and an IDE hard disk... but OS/2 2 stayed stable and responsive under massive load.

But it didn't last.

In 1993 along came Windows NT. It was even more bulletproof (because it was even more restrictive on drivers and things at first), and it required a massive PC to run at all -- a Pentium with 16MB was entry level -- but it did all that, even more stably, and it also included networking as standard, and TCP/IP as standard, and dial-up TCP as standard.

That was the first machine I had a routed connection to the Internet on. I had my own dial-up email account, and work CI$ account, but I could dial into CI$ from NT 3.1 and ping the internet and it worked. Amazing. I never tried this new World Wide Web thing because it sounded like a toy, but I had email and USENET and FTP and CI$ all at the same time and it just worked. It was amazing. And it was on my work LAN and talking to servers at the same time.

OS/2 2.0 and 2.1 couldn't do that without even more expensive add-ons. OS/2 3.0 made it an expensive premium edition, "Warp Connect".

NT had it in the box.

It was the future.

Yes, it was normal, for sure. I had an Amiga and it was also bad. Visits to the Guru ("Guru Meditation Error", equivalent of Windows UAEs) were common.

Around 1994, I moved to Linux and later Solaris, where crashes were rare.

I didn't get an Amiga until a decade after their peak but yes, even I knew about guru meditations. :-)

And bombs on the ST. Macs got a hardware button to drop into a debugger and you could try to continue, but it rarely worked.

When a Mac app died, a message told you that the OS had become unstable and it might crash soon and you should save your work in all other programs and reboot as soon as possible.

Since Mac OS X fixed that, the message was specifically and carefully reworded, to say that an app had died and your OS and all other apps were unaffected and there was no need to reboot. Few noticed this but it was clever and funny.

> [...] and it required a massive PC to run at all -- a Pentium with 16MB was entry level [...].

Minimum was a 386 (12 MB RAM, 16 MB RAM for the ASE); seems the recommended minimum for NT 3.5 (Workstation/Server) according to German trade press of the time (c't, 1994) was a 486. If that made sense given NT's widely reported sluggish performance is another story.

Back in the mid-1990s, my personal home file server was an IBM PS/2 Model 80, the highest end 80386DX IBM offered: 25MHz, and a tiny bit of L1 cache on the motherboard. I ran NT Server 3.51 on it.

Yes, it worked. As a server, it was perfectly usable and rock solid. I used it for years and it never ever crashed.

But I never logged into the console. NT 3.x ran on a 386 but you would not want to use it as a desktop computer.