> I have set up MS Office to run from the server and of course we have full
> Internet capability over a T-1.  One may think Win 95 is laughable and NT
> unstable, but please be aware that lots of people are installing those things
> quite successfully.  It is my contention that if you have good hardware and a
> clean install, Win95 and NT run just fine, thank you very much.  It is the
> same thing as with the HP 3000.
 
NT is _not_ stable. And I have the battle scars and experience to prove it.
I've been battling with NT since early 3.1 days. If you care to listen,
I can detail to you the numerous major design flaws and bugs I've
discovered along the way. (I won't post it here, it would be much too long).
 
> All this to say that when I hear people complain about Windows 95 or NT and
> make sweeping statements that they are unstable or do not work or . . . I am
> just amazed! This has not been my experience.  Am I that good or charmed or
> are these folks that unlucky?  Well let us look at some numbers.
 
Sales figures != quality. We all know losedoze 3.1 is the biggest piece
of unstable trash, but it's the best selling piece of software on the PC.
But you're trying to equate sales figures to product quality. It doesn't
quite work that way.
 
To the point-n-drool crowd, 1-2 crashes/day will make NT look like a
miracle of modern science to those used to 20 crashes/day with win3.1 and
win95.
 
> According to Dataquest as of this month, MickeySoft has shipped 25 Million
> copies of Windows 95, 3.5 million copies as upgrades and 21.5 million copies
> on new computers.  This is not bad for an unstable product.  The same survey
> shows 2.6 million copies of NT sold in 1995 and up to 9 million copies
> [...]
> revisit some sweeping statements.
 
"They" were predicting 9 million NT units/year for 1994, so what happened?
 
BTW Unix is still out-selling NT. NT has a higher growth curve, but Unix
is still outselling it in volume. (Of course, NT is coming up from 0, so
its initial curve is going to look better). But both are still growing.
 
This isn't even counting the free Unixes that are installed -- you know,
FreeBSD, NetBSD, Linux. The last web survey had more Linux internet
servers on the net than WFWG/Win95/WinNT _combined_. The last estimates
put the total installed base of free Unixes at around 2.5 million.
 
> The next things I am working on are IIS, SQL Server 6.5 and connectivity to
> my HP 3000.  BTW, Hicomp's NT server is running Windows NT 4.0 Beta 2 and
> whilst it looks great and works pretty well, it still has a few problems with
> MS Backoffice 2.0.
 
Let me know when you get IIS running. Give me the IP address of your NT
box and I'll introduce you to the horrifying security holes that it's
pocked full of. (Crash NT, destroy the filesystem, etc. Real life
demonstrations can be very effective :-)
 
-Dan