'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers)

[Brenda A. Bell]

> > As much as I hate to give them credit for anything, I believe
> > Redmond is greatly responsible for the kind of PC hardware we have
> > today... Windows 3.1 was a hog, but people wanted it and the
> > hardware vendors did what they needed to to keep up.
> 
> I have to disagree.  While I think they may have had an influence, I
> think the largest influence was by far had by the gaming industry.
> They're the ones pushing the graphics accelerators into the gagillions
> of pixels per nanosecond range... and the average home/business user
> STILL has no need of anything more powerful than a Pentium 200MHz
> running Windows 95.  Except for games.

Since the introduction of Win95, absolutely... I was more thinking about
the early 90's when Windows 2 and 3.1 demanded more from the hardware
and everytime it got more, it was never enough... then comes NT which
requires even more because its intended use is a business environment...
none of these were really targetted for gaming platforms, but I believe
their quickly increasing resource requirements paved the way.