Yeah, it was a very pleasant experience, but it gave me this impression of windows 98 (or the 9x kernel in general):

- - - The Pyramid OS - - -

When windows98 boots up, it's like when you build a pyramid of cards ( /\/\/\ ach you know what I imagine). Now you know how careful you must be and pray after each card you add on that everything don't fall apart. Well eventually, if you got a new deck of cards, it's "pretty" easy to finish the pyramid. And so it is with windows98, after a fresh install, you're pretty sure it'll boot nicely up after the first couple of days.

However. Since we usually add new cards to this pyramid (install new programs, and run them simoultaneously), it get's more unstable (because of the weight of the new cards) so we must be careful. We won't be lucky all the time, so sooner or later one of those cards we add "crash". And then, depending on where that card was in the pyramid, the pyramid either falls completely down, or just a side-row, or lastly only three at the top.

Let's say it wasn't a card in the middle, rather on at the top. Then we don't have to start all over again (reboot), and can hopefully just add another card where that other card falled down. What's bad here is that when the other card crashed, we couldn't remove it. So we had to put other cards atop of that vertical card.

And anyone who has ever tried that with a real deck of cards know it's a hard task to continue. It will probably rage the hole pyramid because of the different weight and the other card get a little higher etc. Ok, let's try to remove it. Then well either crash the hole pyramid or maybe it will actually work!

Ok this is all terrible, but what about windowsNT, win2k, linux, unix, solaris, amiga etc.

Well, they are a hole different story. Imagine now a completely horizontale 4x4 set of boxes. These boxes, as you easily can imagine, are very fair to set-up. Just put them down on the ground, nicely side by side, and you're done! So what about if you wanto add more boxes (run/install applications/drivers/aips)? Well that's no-problemo! just stack them up side by side with the other boxes so it will eventually become a horizontale 4x5, 5x5, 5x6 etc.

And if any of these rolls over (crashes), it's because some other box was nasty or the box that rolled over wasn't really a quadric box. Also, it usually won't disturb any of the other boxes, at least not the important 4x4 set in the middle. And lastly, you can just replace that box any time it falls over (crashes).

I'm very melodramatic here, but this is what I feel about the win9x kernel vs. the winNT kernel / linux kernel after lived through dos-win311-win95-winNT-win98-win2k and an old friends Amiga.