This makes me wonder why NT's minimum requirements were six times those of Windows 3.1's. Both 3.1 and NT 3.1 had essentially the same front-end, to my knowledge, so was NT's back-end just that vastly more inefficient than DOS?
Vastly more advanced. The NT kernel was designed by Dave Cutler (of VMS fame). When work on NT started, it was simply beyond what PCs could do: the design included every high-profile buzzword from the minicomputer world, as well as portability across CPU architectures and a hardware abstraction layer. (Originally NT was supposed to be OS/2 3.0.)
NT was one of Microsoft's most brilliant long-term investments. It delivered the true Unix competitor they needed in the '90s, and the kernel is still there in Windows 8 with no urgent need to replace it.
If you ever have a chance to read the book "Showstopper" by G. Pascal Zachary (and haven't already), do it. Awesome book about Cutler and the creation of Windows NT.
Raymond also glosses over this a bit in his article. Microsoft wasn't selling Windows 95. Microsoft was selling an upgrade product to corporations who ran Office.
There were few (if any) 12MB machines, it was mostly 8MB or 16MB. (If you had 4MB, Windows 95 would boot and you could play Minesweeper.)
The target market had 8MB systems. Which needed to run Windows 95 + Office 95 flawlessly. 4MB was a lie and a fake goal -- which made it all the way to the box -- that made sure an 8MB system could run Office.
User Interface and Plug and Play were the risk items. I personally thought giving the critical path guys shitty dev machines was shortsighted -- we had plenty of ways to make sure the overall system met performance goals.
NT wasn't that much bigger. It had the Win16 subsystem (WoW), so there were basically two copies of Windows running at all times. Still, NT fit comfortably in 8MB and ran every version of Office (old and new) well in 12MB.
TL;DR: arguments over 4MB and one cycle of upgrade revenue stalled Windows and IE development for 15+ years.
NT is far more advance and feature rich than Win31/Win95/DOS. Its internal is quite elegant and powerful. Its minor modified versions (XP, Vista, Win7, Win8) run till today and still going strong.
