I remember it like this. Windows XP and earlier was a horrible era for stability and security and the world was overall less connected. Phones were always on and always connected. The iPhone was honestly the first stable internet device, that didn't sleep or pause, and the first internet device many people had that wasn't infected by viruses.
> Windows XP and earlier was a horrible era for stability and security
Huh? Windows XP was the first NT-based release for home users. It was a milestone in stability.
It was more stable after the SP2, but initially it was undermined by buggy drivers and rampant malware, NT kernel or not. True, it was better than ME…
What most people remember of XP now is what it became after a couple of years of fixes and improvements, and the contrast with Vista.
It was hailed for its improvements in stability from the time it was released. My recollection was that it was a massive improvement over 98/ME lineage. It was mostly a wash vs Windows 2000.
Yes, it became more stable with the service packs, but it was a significantly more stable OS out of the gates than anything consumer users had been getting.
Rampant malware was a separate (and very significant) issue.
Sure, but there were also multiple points in time (even after SP2) when you had to unplug the network to install it, because in a couple minutes of being online or in a large LAN it would get infected during the setup and shutdown. You also needed all updates and a third-party firewall on a CD. Win+R shutdown /a is still in my fingertips after all these years.
XP was godawful for years security- and stability-wise until the release of SP2.
No it wasn’t. XP was quite solid in terms of stability, miles beyond its predecessors. You have to remember that its mediate predecessor was Windows ME.
It was also far more secure, but it was still not nearly secure enough.
> ”Upon its release, Windows XP received critical acclaim, noting increased performance and stability (especially compared to Windows Me)…”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP
It definitely was.
> It was also far more secure, but it was still not nearly secure enough.
That's one way to say "plagued by a decade of botnets."
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP
Now google XP blue screen of death. Still alive and well then.
If the bar is Microsoft's most loathed release, then I guess you could call it stable and secure.
> It definitely was.
Weird that contemporary articles praised its stability then.
> That's one way to say "plagued by a decade of botnets."
No, it’s a way of saying that it introduced real identity-based security isolation to the OS. Prior to this every user had full access to the entire system incisions everyone else’s data who shared the system.
Unfortunately Windows XP was not hardened to the reality of the internet. (Nor were any of its predecessors.)
Compared to W98SE, the actual OS for home users (almost no one used ME), Windows XP was a godsend.
Security maybe, but not stability. XP SP1 was rock solid, and even RTM was nowhere close to "godawful".