When to Choose NT versus Win95

"We will focus on NT as our mainstream platform two to four years from now when 16MB of RAM on the desktop is common."

Get ready for this: on June 12, 1995 Computer Reseller News reported that Bill Gates said: "We will focus on NT as our mainstream platform two to four years from now when 16MB of RAM on the desktop is common." Thanks a lot, Bill, for confusing the heck out of us. I think what Gates is saying is that if you add the nifty Win95 interface onto NT (coming in the next release), and you have a really fast computer (like a Pentium) with lots of RAM (at least 16MB), then NT has a number of additional benefits that Win95 doesn't have. These include a clean, new 32-bit architecture (unlike Win95s hybrid), several years of in-the-field testing, platform independence (hence much greater scalability: NT will run on Intel, PowerPC, Dec Alpha, MIPS - Win95 runs only on x86), excellent communications and great networking. Since NT supports Win 3.1 and Win95 apps, it should be very interesting to SET users. Right? We think so. This is not to suggest that you should necessarily buy NT! instead of Win95. But you should be very happy that its there, because it gives you a great migration path. And, by all means, if you have network thatis large enough to require a dedicated server, a NT server is the way to go.

Here are two "thoughts" to help you choose between NT and Win95:

• If your need for computing is growing faster than the x86 you should consider NT now instead of Win95.
• If you are currently running UNIX then you should consider skipping Win95 and going straight to NT as it has more of the features that you're probably used to.

© 1996 Scitech International, Inc.  All rights reserved

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