Thanks for sharing. It was that bad back then? As a consumer user the stability brought by the NT kernel was great back then, but maybe enterprise wise it was a different story? I never worked as a sys admin so can't say.
For the last point what was the golden standard back in the mid-late 90s, if we don't include mainframe/minicomputers? Was it Solaris or BSD?
Now that I think about it, I feel sad that I do not have the technical prowess to compare operating systems :/
Beside the NT4 servers we had SunOS 5.x and Digital UNIX (later upgraded to Tru64 UNIX). Yes, from sysadmin point of view they were way more consistent performance wise and less problematic to operate in general. BSDs were not 'approved' but nonetheless we were running DNS and some other internet facing stuff on OpenBSD 2.x if I remember correctly.