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Pretty sure Win 3.x had no concept of processes and no memory isolation of any kind. Contemporary Macs were in a similar position. Both were ludicrously unreliable by 21st century standards. And in both cases the hardware - Intel 80386s and Motorola 68000s - offered support for protected memory. The software just wasn't there yet.

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Both were ludicrously unreliable by 21st century standards.

They were ludicrously unreliable by 20th century standards, too. It's just that not a lot of people had hands-on access to a mainframe or a mini running Unix, so the end-users got to think that's just how computers work. From my POV, PCs and Macs of that era were toys that coincidentally would occasionally allow useful work to get done. That's not to say I didn't do a lot of development for both, but my $DEITY did I wish I had to money for a real machine like a NeXT.

And MacOS didn't get protected memory until Apple acquired NeXT!

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