Twenty years ago this past weekend, Microsoft released its first version of Windows NT, the software foundation on which the firm’s devices and services empire now rests. NT has had an amazing 20 years, and while I’m sure the next 20 will be just as interesting, this is a good time to step back and remember the past.
First, if you’re not familiar with the development of Windows NT, I strongly recommend reading (hopefully re-reading) "Showstoppers!" by G. Pascal Zachary. (It’s available in paper, Kindle, and Nook versions, among others.) Still the definitive account of the creation of a monumental software product, "Showstoppers!" includes some amazing blasts from the past.
Ostensibly named for "New Technology," NT was OS guru Dave Cutler’s follow-up to VMS, and thus one can add one letter to each of the letters and arrive at WNT, or Windows NT. Cutler had been developing this VMS sequel, originally code-named Mica, to run on a RISC platform called Prism. But when Digital cancelled the project, Cutler jumped to Microsoft and changed computer history forever.
NT was driven by Cutler’s desire to one-up UNIX, which he saw as old-fashioned and inefficient, and his dream for the OS was that it would one day be in use for 20 years, just like UNIX. Congratulations, Dave. You did it.
Of course, much of the success for NT should also be given to Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who was smart enough to not just hire Cutler and a bunch of ex-Digital geniuses like Mark Lucovsky (who helped create the NTFS file system) and a handful of outsiders like David Thompson (who led the development of NT's networking subsystem), but to leave them to their own devices. Cutler’s team operated as a skunkworks of sorts within Microsoft, basically a separate organization that could do its own thing. And it did.
From here on out, things are going to get a bit fuzzy, because I’m dealing with my own memory and not well-documented computer industry history. As a technology enthusiast, I was always intrigued by NT and other systems like UNIX and NextStep that simply weren’t, in the early-to-mid-1990s, available to the masses. I recall picking up a box for the original version of Windows NT—which was hilariously named Windows NT 3.1 to match the versioning with the then-current version of 16-bit Windows—in a Best Buy and wondering at its heady $300 pricetag. Who could afford such a thing? And why would they even want it?
My understanding of NT in those days was that it ran on traditional PC hardware, but very, very slowly. I didn’t get a chance to use the product until the release of Windows NT 3.51 (code-named Daytona), a version that offered better performance and reliability. Of course, just a few months later, Windows 95 happened and with it Microsoft’s transition to a new desktop-based OS shell, Explorer, which replaced the Program Manager (and other manager interfaces) from earlier Windows and NT versions.
NT 4 (also called the Shell Update Release, because it was basically NT 3.51 with the Windows 95 shell and some new management tools) was the first version of NT I used regularly. Indeed, I had been writing books for a few years by then, and I had shipped my first software to the public, so NT 4 was perfect on two counts: I wrote a book about NT 4 for higher education and used this system to write Delphi applications; unlike with Windows 95, it wouldn’t crash down to the hardware regularly. In fact, it was rock-solid.
