Motivation

Study three different operating systems on the same PC hardware platform:

• Windows for Workgroups---Windows with integrated network support

• Windows NT 3.5

• NetBSD---representative Unix system.

Want to compare typical research system (Unix) with typical commodity operating system (Windows) to see if system features (or lack thereof) affect application performance.

Maybe we really don't need preemptive multitasking, protected address spaces and abstractions such as pipes and background jobs.

Both Windows versions must allows 16-bit applications to work. More impact on Windows than Windows NT.