Based, not based... that's not what makes an OS stable, guys.
NT/2000/XP OSes are all relatively stable (especially compared to the 95/98/ME line) because of their HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) and their protection of memory space.
The HAL is the "waldo glove" for any and all programs that request the use of any peice of hardware, be it playing a sound, rendering a D3D object, or writing to disk. No program can access hardware directly; all operations are routed through the HAL, which enforces legal and safe requests. I'd guess that this prevents about 40% of the crashes common to the 95 line of OSes.
However, the HAL is also why 2000 sucks in gaming performance (NT is unmentionable; XP's gaming is apparently good, but I'm unaware of how they sped up this area while maintaining gaming stability). Every game has an extra layer to push screen writes through, which slows things down by an annoying amount.
The second issue is the protected memory space. This basically prevents any old program from just accessing any area of the computer's RAM whenever it wants. Every program is kept in its own seperate memory section; if/when that program crashes, it does not take down the rest of the OS along with it. In fact, 99% of the time, when a program crashes in 2000 (due to bugs in that program), it is removed cleanly from RAM and the OS remains just as stable after the crash as it was before.
AFAIK, both those technologies were introduced to the Windows series of operating systems with the first version of Windows NT (3.51, I believe...?). The other line of OSes, actually starting at MS-DOS 1.0 (or whichever the first MS-DOS version was), did not have a significant change in
core technologies until it was merged into the NT line in XP.
Yes, that's right. Windows 3.1 was DOS-based, as were 95, 98, 98SE, and ME. All had DOS 16-bit crapola at their very core, although beginning with Win95, more and more parts of the OS were enhanced, if not completely upgraded, to 32-bit instructions. But they always retained that 16-bit compatability at the kernel level.
*sniff sniff*
Which is why C&C: Tib. Dawn doesn't work under Win2000...
