Recall a project back in the days where the customer wanted to upgrade their workstations but also …

And here I am, in a shop of about 3K FTE, where we are squeezed 6 persons onto a single socket Xeon which barely beats an iPhone 15 Pro rendering those 12 screen worth of data slowing down to a crawl, huge latency, crappy disk latency too (feels like were all on the same spinning Rust, but it's Windows and some VMWare middleware so who knows why this is slow). Somehow snappyness is completely eradicated.

>it was decided to use network booting and running Windows from a RAM disk. What tech did that use? I imagine a "modern" system doing this would use a small RAM disk for the base Windows installation to boot from with any critical apps inside, and a second disk image mounted via HTTP for any "bulk" data, all via a custom iPXE build. But NT4 predates the PXE standard by a number of years, and also the concept of mounting disk images via HTTP (or other SAN protocol). Was this some Netware stuff perhaps?

> a beefy NT4-based Citrix server This was also when I learned about the pitfalls of multithreading... I had started trying to use multithreading, and had implemented it in my raytracer. It worked like a charm on my machine. During that project they brought a 4-socket server in the lab for testing, so after hours I fired up my raytracer on it, excited to see the promised 4x speedup... only to be met by an immediate access violation. I had of course missed a lock, but it worked fine on my computer because it only had a single CPU (core) so even if I spawned multiple threads, the chances of them tripping over each other at that point was very low. Not so when they could actually run simultaneously.