128MB was pretty common by the time Windows 2000 was released. I could afford it and I wasn’t paid well at that time.

Plus Windows ME wasn’t exactly nimble either. People talk about the disaster that was Vista and Windows 8 but ME was a thousand times worse. Thank god Windows 2000 was an option.

It got much better once the release date rolled in, but it was something I remember discussed a lot at the time among those who did use NT.

Also, at the time NT was still somewhat limited in official settings to pretty much rare more expensive places and engineering systems, with typical business user keeping to Windows 98 on "client" and NT Server domain controllers or completely different vendors, at least outside big corporations with fat chequebooks. Active Directory started changing it a lot faster, the benefits wer great and 2000 having hotplug et al was great improvement, but it took until XP for the typical office computer to really run on NT in my experience.

Let’s not forget that XP had twice the system requirements that 2000 did.

I think the main difference is really just that XP had a “Home” edition that came preinstalled on home PCs.

There’s no reason Microsoft couldn’t do that with 2000, and in fact I read that some stores did stock Windows 2000 instead of Windows Me (though this wasn’t something I personally witnessed).

I'm not talking about environments that could run Home Edition - one of the things MS disabled in Home was ability to join AD domains, something that was available on 9x.

From what I recall, an important point for releasing ME at all was that compatibility (both in applications and drivers) was not yet ready at the time of NT 5.0 going gold, leading to a stopgap solution being deployed.

In my experience, offices did run Windows 2000. I also knew offices that ran NT4 too.

I guess it depends on the office though. At risk of stating the obvious: Different organisations will do things differently.

NT4 was reasonably rarer due to hardware compatibility issues as well as software compatibility. Windows 2000 brought great change there, but it only really finished with the very soon after XP.

The organizations that really needed NT for various reasons (engineering software, SMP, higher security settings, etc.) did move as early as NT4, indeed. Also, non-trivial amount of Alpha workstations with NT4 (as well as Pentium Pro ones)

My understanding is that ME from a technological point of view was 98 with NT drivers. It probably was a critical step in getting vendors to make NT drivers for all of their screwball consumer hardware, and this made XP, the "move the consumers to the NT kernel" step a success. The lack of drivers is also what made XP 64 bit edition so fraught with peril, but xp-64/vista was probably critical for win7's success for the same reason.

But yeah, what a turd of a system.

98 was the one that introduced NT drivers (WDM).

Didn't it still use VXD drivers for a lot of stuff though?

Yes, because WDM support was limited. It only allowed synchronous requests and was really only suitable for USB or storage drivers.

It was roughly $1/MB in 1999. Or about $250 USD with inflation in 2024 dollars for a 128MB DIMM.