Poll: The most significant Windows ever released?

[Nothinman]

but, I really can't say that NT 3.1, or NT 4.0 even for that matter was the most significant because, they IMO were still not at a level of compatibility with mainly games where it was seen in enough places to make an impact. What killed NT 4 in terms of games was mainly the lack of 3 key features that 2000 added:

level of significance == games support?

Come on. Just because you couldn't play Need for Speed on it doesn't mean it was an insignificant release.

Win2K and XP are insignificant releases, they should have been released as a service pack and a Plus! addon.

It's either NT 4 or Win311, because NT 4 was the first version of NT that really took off anywhere and is now the basis for nearly all MS' OSes. Win311 because it was the first Windows GUI that anyone really used, before that PC users were stuck in DOS which had no protected memory, no VM, was only single tasking, etc.

 

[thornc]

Tell them Nothinman....

I was going to post exactly that, but you said it more cleary...

NT, was the first multi-user, multi-tasking, multi-threaded OS that MS released...it was the major step,
getting read of DOS and moving forward...

It has nothing to do with games. You can play games with NT, I did it. OpenGL games run fine!
And all apps that I tryed in it work perfectly also... so to me NT was the best release...

Well win95 made windows mainstream, but as a CS person myself, NT made things right...

 

[manly]

<<

I didn't mean literally. With the release of Win95, we all know there was MEGA-hype about it. Until then, the few people who had a computer were using win3.11. Win95 really got people thinking about getting on the Internet. Maybe I should have said that Win95 got the whole "Internet Boom" going. >>



Sorry, I don't mean to be disagreeable but W95 predated the Internet boom by a good year. W95 wasn't really related to the Internet at all; it simply brought the long-time ease of use of the Mac OS interface to PC users.

However, I do believe that if W95 didn't integrate a TCP/IP stack, AOL would have millions more lusers today (probably at MSN's expense). Many lay people will forever think AOL == Internet.

edit:

I also find it hilarious how many people chimed in with NT4 as the answer. It speaks volumes that W2K was a total rewrite of the OS codebase (doesn't mean all wheels were reinvented of course). NT4 was more stable than the W9x line, but it was a relative blip in the consumer radar. The only good thing to say about NT4 is that it did help M$ get a toe-hold in the server OS (and workstation) market, even though in comparison to *nix offerings at the time, it was a joke.