XP was the good one.
Too good in fact. It was so stable, folks didn't need to buy new stuff so in came the forced obsolescence.
At the same time Microsoft lost its anti-trust case in the 90s and a likely part of the settlement w/the government was to allow back doors into their systems.
“The Windows XP Professional x64 Edition was particularly important because, unlike 32-bit XP which was arbitrarily limited to 4 GB of RAM, the 64-bit version could support up to 128 GB of physical memory. It utilized a technology called WoW64 (Windows on Windows 64) to run 32-bit applications, but it lacked native support for older 16-bit software. It was built on the Windows Server 2003 codebase rather than the core 32-bit XP codebase, meaning it required its own unique set of hardware”
At the same time Microsoft lost its anti-trust case in the 90s and a likely part of the settlement w/the government was to allow back doors into their systems.
*************************************************
Correct.
After a long tech support call to Amazon on why I can’t listen to or watch anything on Prime the tech support guy I was working with found that unix systems are deliberately blocked. The “update your browser” error was basically a lie. He went to some trouble to find that little factoid. Thanked him and wrote a nice follow-up on him without mentioning what he had found.
Windows has a back door somewhere that amazon - and others - use to verify users. The BSD systems don’t have that leak. They blocked Linux systems also at the time; don’t know if that has been fixed at Amazon.
Windows XP was Microsoft’s best OS ever. It crashed on me only once.