Is that architecture actually good or is it just complex? If it's more advanced, why did MS replace it with NT? It has long been known that you can trade off performance and protection; in retrospect 95/98 just wasn't reliable enough.
I remember using NT4 for web dev work in the later 90's... was kind of funny how many times browsers (Netscape especially) would crash from various memory errors that never happened in Win9x... how many of those were early exploits/exploitable issues. That and dealing with Flash around that time, and finding out I can access the filesystem.
I pretty much ran NT/Win2K at home for all internet stuff from then on, without flash at all. I do miss the shell replacement I used back in those days, I don't remember the name, but also remember Windowblinds.
Yep, the Mac was the same way. Plenty of apps would dereference null pointers and just keep going. You'd reboot every day or two to clear out the corruption.
I think it's because that architecture was less understood than the traditional OS model at the time; and they could've easily virtualised more of the hardware and gradually made passthrough not the default, eventually arriving at something like Xen and other bare-metal hypervisors that later became common.
...and as the sibling comment alludes to, MS eventually adopted that architecture somewhat with Hyper-V and the VBS feature, but now running NT inside of the hypervisor instead of protected-mode DOS.
