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I feel like almost all software since roughly the advent of the CD-ROM, when distro size stopped being a major limit, has been in a race to outbloat Moore's Law.


The difference between NT and modern bloat (like electron) is that it was very much necessary bloat, the sort that makes computing safer and more reliable (running more things in user mode rather than with kernel authority, true multitasking), as opposed to abstractions that exist solely to boost productivity and make developers happy assembling their library lego blocks. But that 'bloat' made it too expensive in hardware requirements for the home user which is why the NT line had to exist separately from the 9x series until XP. And if anything, unfortunately, Microsoft kept making more compromises with NT that I wish they never did. NT 3.5 ran the graphic stack in user mode. They put it in the kernel for NT4 and only started backtracking on that sort of monolithic design with Vista. (Vista was a controversial OS but most of the architectural decisions they've made with it were the right ones and those decisions still live on in Windows 7, 8, 10 and 11).


Wirth's law




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