The NT kernel was designed around non-blocking async I/O; all I/O in NT is async and leveraged completion ports. I believe Solaris is the only other OS with IOCP.

Back then, Linux had either a primitive scheduler or O(n) scheduler, until 2003. NT shipped with an O(1) scheduler.

I personally feel NT still does high pressure memory management better than Linux. No opinion about other OSes, although macOS will ask the user what to force quit -- then again, given people have been seeing memory ballooning in random apps, including OOTB apps on macOS 15... Apple has other issues.

NT is great. It's just plagued by Win32. And those designers...

https://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~scott/courses/Spring01/111/slide...

> In 1996, more NT server licenses were sold than UNIX licenses