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Windows NT Turns 20

Posted by timothy on from the in-many-ways-it-never-really-went-away dept.

An anonymous reader writes with a link to the observation from ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley of Windows NT's 20th birthday (it came out on July 27th, 1993): ""In 1993, Microsoft launched Windows NT 3.1. It was followed up by NT 3.5, 3.51 and 4.0. Microsoft's Windows releases still rely on NT-inspired numbering conventions. Windows 7's build numbers commenced with 6.1; Windows 8's with 6.2; and Windows 8.1 with 6.3." The article also reminds us that "NT's not ancient history, in spite of its age. The NT 'core' is what's inside Windows 8, Windows Server 2012, Windows Phone 8, Windows Azure and the Xbox One.""

4 of 213 comments (clear)

  1. Lesson One by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The article also reminds us that "NT's not ancient history, in spite of its age. The NT 'core' is what's inside Windows 8, Windows Server 2012, Windows Phone 8, Windows Azure and the Xbox One.

    Indeed. No matter how structurally sound your operating system may be, UI developers (receiving messages from on high) can still make it look like trash.

    1. Re:Lesson One by EvanED · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You don't need to have done something better to be able to determine whether something is good or bad.

      Now that said, the NT kernel itself is pretty solid.

    2. Re:Lesson One by epyT-R · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Actually the NT kernel is probably the most well engineered component of modern windows. hell, it is what gave windows things like preemptive multithreading, proper memory protection, and hardware abstraction. The win32 base runtime sits on top of this, and pretty much everything else microsoft has released over the years acted as a wrapper for it. Windows 95 was the attempt to squeeze win32 into 4MB of ram for consumer machines while keeping hardware ports accessible by dos applications. These two goals were fundamentally in conflict with stable and reliable software. The reason we don't have to reboot windows every few hours anymore is due to the windows NT kernel.. As bad as you may think windows to be, it's A LOT better than the days of 3.x/9x.

  2. Re:NT 3.51 was the best kernel by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I didn't see the source but could definitely tell. I remember NT 3.51 being very responsive even when a program was misbehaving. If I recall I had it run 16-bit programs in their own memory so they didn't affect each other. NT 4.0 did seem like PnP was just crammed in along with the Windows 95 interface. I feel old.