
Carmack: Why Was Doom Developed on a NeXT? - milen
https://www.quora.com/Why-was-Doom-developed-on-a-NeXT/answer/John-Carmack-8?share=1
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jandrese
It's amazing how far we've come that one of the selling points on the NeXT box
over the traditional Windows 3.11/DOS development machine at the time was that
the NeXT box didn't lock up or crash constantly.

People today forget just how annoyingly common it was for old versions of
Windows to lock up or crash for no apparent reason at completely random times.

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cordite
Was the nature of the crashes due to poor process isolation? Processes going
into infinite loops? Memory corruption of the OS?

It seems like the limitations were probably not hardware related, although
many hardware features since have made certain tasks and isolation easier.
Though unix had a reputation for requiring more capable computers to run.

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Lagged2Death
Pretty sure Win 3.x had no concept of processes and no memory isolation of any
kind. Contemporary Macs were in a similar position. Both were ludicrously
unreliable by 21st century standards. And in both cases the hardware - Intel
80386s and Motorola 68000s - offered support for protected memory. The
software just wasn't there yet.

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mikestew
_Both were ludicrously unreliable by 21st century standards._

They were ludicrously unreliable by 20th century standards, too. It's just
that not a lot of people had hands-on access to a mainframe or a mini running
Unix, so the end-users got to think that's just how computers work. From my
POV, PCs and Macs of that era were toys that coincidentally would occasionally
allow useful work to get done. That's not to say I didn't do a lot of
development for both, but my $DEITY did I wish I had to money for a real
machine like a NeXT.

