Using VirtualBox this is definitely the case.

Depending on how the BIOS reports back the amount of memory available, NT 3.1 may only see no greater than 64 MB RAM. Even the minimum requirements of 16 MB RAM was rather steep for that period so the following caveat wasn’t particularly concerning at the time. In 1993 a PC having 64 MB RAM wasn’t really heard of, though not impossible. This didn’t mean you couldn’t install on a computer with PCI slots, it just meant that if the PCI card plugged in had drivers available it would run in ISA/EISA compatibility mode. It was the first Windows version to include TCP/IP, however with no DHCP support it meant that you had to manually configure an IP address for the network connection. Other caveats included a lack of support for IDE CD-ROM drives or the PCI bus. NT 3.1 crashing after attempting to login into my user account. Back then, Intel had been beta testing their new Pentium processors to supersede the 486, and introduced the CPUID instruction set which allows software to identify the CPU’s features. It’s very easy for the VM to crash or for NT 3.1 to complain about the hardware due to what was available at the time. Installing Windows NT 3.1 is certainly not the easiest Windows to install into VirtualBox due to a few limitations.

A relative lack of 32-bit software and higher system requirements meant success was limited and most of the attention was towards MS-DOS and Windows 3.1. There was two editions – one named simply Windows NT 3.1 for workstation use, and the other named Windows NT 3.1 Advanced Server which obviously suggests for servers on a network. The first version was 3.1, to match the versioning of the more consumer orientated Windows 3.1 that was released a year prior.

Microsoft’s first true 32-bit operating system, it generally was to be seen only on high-end desktop workstations and servers. Once the partnership with IBM faltered with the development of OS/2, Microsoft went alone and Windows NT was born back in 1993.

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