Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: $500 NT Systems? Really?

Author:Karl Fast
Posted:6/11/1999; 1:25:09 PM
Topic:$15,000 to Burn
Msg #:7230 (In response to 7228)
Prev/Next:7229 / 7231

Well, you don't need NT Server for Frontier, BUT you do need Server if you want to run, well, a server. Microsoft deliberately crippled NT Workstation 4 so that it will only accept a limited number of TCP/IP connections. You can use Frontier on Workstation to serve up web content, but the number of hits you can handle is limited not by horsepower or bandwidth, but the TCP/IP stack.

This started with NT 4. At the time, Web Site from O'Reilly offered the best bang for the buck when it came to NT web servers. And everyone was running it on Workstation 3.5x. Why spend all that money on server when workstation did almost as good a job?

MS didn't like this. They want you to use Server as a Server and Workstation as a Workstation. So they crippled the TCP/IP stack in Workstation making it useless as anything other than a development system.

There was quite the uproar about this. Tim O'Reilly was very pissed off, and so were lots of other people. I don't remember the details, but I'm quite sure the limitation is still there.

I could be wrong though. Can anyone offer a more definitive answer, with URL's?

karl

There are responses to this message:

This page was archived on 6/13/2001; 4:50:43 PM.

© Copyright 1998-2001 UserLand Software, Inc.