The most popular desktop operating system today is still Windows, with its userbase roughly equally divided between Windows 10 and Windows 11. While we tend to focus on the marketing names used by Microsoft, like Windows XP, Windows 7, or Windows 11, their real name is still, to this day, Windows NT. Underneath all the marketing names, there’s still the Windows NT version number corresponding to the marketing name; Windows XP was Windows NT 5.1 (or 5.2 for the 64bit version), Windows 7 was Windows NT 6.1, and the current latest version, Windows 11, is Windows NT 10.0, a version number that’s been static since 2015.
Of course, version numbers don’t really mean anything, but it does highlight that yes, the Windows you’re using is still Windows NT, and thus, the operating system you’re using isn’t a part of the Windows 3.x/9x line, but of the NT line. And probably the first version of Windows NT that set us on this path is Windows NT 4.0 – with Windows 2000 sealing the deal, and Windows XP delivering the obvious knock-out punch.
Since Windows NT 4.0 turned 29 years old a few days ago, Dave Farquhar published a retrospective of this release, highlighting many important changes in Windows NT 4.0 that in my mind mark it as the true beginning of the shift from Windows 9x to Windows NT as Microsoft’s consumer operating system.
First, Windows NT 4.0 was the first version of Windows NT that shipped with the user interface from Windows 95. It brought over the Start menu, taskbar, and everything else introduced with Windows 95 to the Windows NT line, which up until that point had been using the same user interface as Windows 3.x. A default Windows NT 4.0 desktop basically looks indistinguishable from a Windows 95 desktop, and like the earlier versions of NT, it came in a workstation edition for desktop use.
Second, another massive, at the time controversial, change came with the graphics subsystem, as Farquhar notes:
And one change, easily forgotten today, regarded graphics drivers. Microsoft moved the video subsystem from user space, ring 3, to kernel space, ring 0. There was a lot of talk about Ring 0 versus ring 3 on July 19, 2024 thanks to the large computer outage on that day. In 1996, this move was controversial, for the same reasons. The fear was that a malfunction in the graphics driver would now be able to take down the entire system. But the trade-off was much improved performance. It meant Windows NT 4.0 could be used for serious graphics work.
↫ Dave Farquhar
Windows NT 4.0 delivered more than what’s highlighted by Farquhar, of course. A major new feature in Windows NT 4.0 was DirectX, as it was the first Windows version to come with it preinstalled. DirectX support remained limited in NT 4.0, though, so Windows 9x remained the better option for most people playing video games. Other new features were the System Policy Editor and system policies, Sysprep, and, of course, a whole slew of low-level improvements to both the operating system itself as well as its various server-oriented features.
Windows NT 4.0 also happened to be the last version of Windows NT which supported the Alpha, MIPS, and PowerPC architectures, although Windows 2000 retained support for Alpha in its alpha, beta, and release candidate versions. Of course, Windows would later expand its architecture support with first Itanium, and more recently, ARM.
As someone who was selling and managing computer systems at the time, Farquhar has some great insights into why NT 4.0 was such a big deal, and why it seemed to fare better in the market than previous versions of Windows NT did. He also highlights on particular oddity from NT 4.0 that’s still lurking around today, an oddity you really don’t want to run into.
Fun fact: DirectX support in Windows NT never achieved feature parity with Windows 9x, support for 256-color mode was famously missing from Direct3D in Windows NT, which broke some games like Colin McRae Rally that used 256-color mode in the menus.
I remember it was limited to DirectX 3.0, but don’t remember any color limitation.
I think I remember playing Diablo II perfectly fine (though memories from over 25 years back get a little shady).
It was the exact opposite of a limitation, Windows NT’s Direct 3D supported 16-bit color and up but not the 8-bit/256-color mode.
Ah, NT 4.0. I have many stories.
When my (now) wife and I moved in together in the late 90s, I asked her what OS she wanted on her first PC. I was running NT 4.0, she wanted the latest Win9X. After about 2 weeks, she asked me in frustration “Why doesn’t your PC crash?!?!?” After telling her, we became a two NT4 system family. Problem solved.
I went to Comdex Toronto soon after NT4 came out, an asked the Creative Labs guys about drivers for NT. The reaction was “Oh, no we don’t support that! That’s just for business!” One year later, I asked them again and they couldn’t give me all the drivers and stuff fast enough. They had seen the writing on the wall.
I was doing some contracting for a bank in Canada, and they were a big IBM shop. They moved from dumb terminals to PCs running TCP/IP and Windows (All IBM of course, microchannel and all), but the business depended on a lot of 3270 terminal emulators, and one division had an OS/2 “server” set up as the TCP/IP gateway. It would run for a couple of weeks then slow down to be unusable. And the IBM techs couldn’t figure it out. The “top line” IBM techs were simply unable to fix a problem with their software running on their OS on their hardware. After months of getting nowhere, I came in and put in an NT 4.0 server running MS “SNA server”. After setting it up, which was very easy, it worked just fine. It worked perfectly for years, and all I did was apply the service packs when they came out. So, that was when Microsoft did 3270 c0nnectivity BETTER than IBM could do it.
I once had access to a nice DEC Alpha server, and put NT4 on it. It worked fine, but there wasn’t much software for it. However, the DOS emulation was simply brilliant: You could actually run DOS Paradox 3.0 on the system no problem, even though it was an Alpha CPU and didn’t do 8086 emulation in hardware.
It was a good and very important OS that changed a LOT of business computing fundamentals.
Forget the DOS stuff, the real breaktrhough for NT4 on DEC Alpha was FX!32. It allowed you to run Intel software on the Alpha. And it worked amazingly well. It was Rosetta WAY before there was Rosetta and certainly WAY before FEX or Felix.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FX!32
FX32! appeared in 1996.
The first Apple emulation built in the OS (granted, it was not called Rosetta), to translate 68k code in PowerPC appeared with the first Power Macs in march ’94.
I worked with a company that sold imaging equipment that required very beefy DEC Alpha machines to convert PostScript into pixels. We started with Widnows NT 3.1 (pretty bad), then NT 3.5 (not bad), then NT 3.51 (pretty good), and Windwos NT 4.0 in the end. NT 4.0 switched to the Windows 95 desktop interface. Though clearly better, I remember how we all thought it made it seem like a toy. Hilarious.
But I am not sure why Windows NT 4.0 is being called out here specifically. In the WIndows NT world, it was NT 3.51 that seemed like the really ground-breaking release. The memory requirements went down while the speed and stability went up. And every NT workdstation was running the 3D pipes screensaver on OpenGL just to show how powerful it was. Windows NT 4.0 did not seem as ground-breaking (other than the GUI) although video was faster on 4.0 for sure. Windows 2000 was also more memorable than 4.0 as Windows 2000 Professional seemed like everything Windows NT users had ever hoped for. And of course, Windows XP unified the Windows 9x and NT worlds.
One thing that was really exotic about the DEC Alpha and Windows NT is that Windown NT was only 32 bit. It used 32 bit pointers even. But Alpha had no 32 bit mode. So, internally, all those 32 bit pointers just had 32 zeros in front of them. When Microsoft needed to make a 64 bit version of Windows NT, they built it on Alpha but then never brought the Alpha version to market.
https://www.osnews.com/story/136145/windows-2000-64-bit-for-alpha-axp/f
I agree with a lot of the hard work being done before NT 4.0.
Many system dialog boxes kept their NT 3.x style for a few more decades.
And many of them had translation errors in the French version of Windows, which have still not been fixed to this day.
Somehow this shows that these parts of the core OS were left basically untouched for the last decades, and is a testament to Dave Cutler and his team’s good work.
The move to the Windows 95 GUI is clearly what started the widespread adoption of Windows NT though.
I remember some IT/Business newspaper making headlines about which of Windows 95 or Windows NT 3.51 was the better choice for business use, with no clear winner.
The answer was Windows NT 4.0 when it came out just a few months later.
> The move to the Windows 95 GUI is clearly what started the widespread adoption of Windows NT though.
Maybe. Although I do not think that any version of Windows NT was really “widespread” before Windows XP. Even Windows 2000, which was dramatically more successful than NT 4.0, only reached a few tens of millions of machines at most. There were hundreds of millions of Windows 95 users. Windows XP peaked at well over a billion.
Well, NT4 was never targeted at home users, so it clearly did not achieve widespread adoption there.
However, NT4 Workstation basically killed UNIX workstations (most famously SUN and SGI, but many other more niche players), and NT4 Server kicked Novell out of the smallest enterprises (while Windows Server 2000/2003 would finish the job for the bigger ones).
In the early 2000, even before XP came around, Microsoft had already won it all.
Windows 2000 Pro basically replaced Win 9x/Me in the enterprise market, and Windows XP did the same 1.5 years later (with the added Playskool GUI and compatibility tweaks) for the consumers market and small businesses.
But really, NT4 had already took over the world. And you’d see many systems still running NT4 *decades* later (long after it was no longer OK to do so security-wise).
@Nico57
You are right that NT 4.0 did grow pretty quickly in the server market. But a lot of that came from Netware rather than UNIX. And do not discount the role of Linux in bringing down SGI and Sun.
Windows 2000 was released in very early 2000. Here is how the server market ended 1999:
39% – Windows NT
25% – Linux
19% – Netware
15% – UNIX (combined)
https://www.theregister.com/2000/02/10/linux_second_bestselling_server_os/
What was it in 1995?
51% – Netware
https://www.novell.com/news/press/archive/1996/03/pr96056.html
I cannot find reliable numbers but both Linux and Windows NT would be negligible in 1995. UNIX of various flavours would have been a strong number two but there were a number of other systems back then too. Banyan Vines and IBM’s LAN Manager come to mind.
Almost all of the Netware share would have gone to Windows NT so, while Windows NT did pull from UNIX, I think Linux did more damage there. Many UNIX workstations went NT though.
Measured by revenue the picture is different. UNIX vendors printed money in the late 90’s. Windows did not catch up to UNIX from a revenue perspective until 2005. It was Windows Server 2003 that pulled that off (Windows XP). And, from a revenue perspective, Linux was only 10% of the market even then.
https://redmondmag.com/articles/2005/05/31/idc-unix-and-windows-server-market-revenues-equal-for-first-time.aspx
Today, Linux is 65%, Windows about 25%, and UNIX is much of the 10% that is left.
UNIX has held on better than I give it credit for if it was already down to 15% in 1999.
@LeFantome
To me, Novell = Netware
I was indeed talking about their own product, no about SuSE Linux in the few years they owned it, or any Linux business, as you seem to imply.
Hello
The article is right, but the “set us on the path to desktop dominance” does not close with me. I think that the “path to dominance” was marked with a lot of marketing and commercial decision and not only by releasing Windows NT.
Microsoft acknowledged that Windows NT required more hardware resources (just like OS/2), and hardware was expensive at that time, so they decided to have a mediocre Windows release that can run on less resources until the world will be hardware ready (or hardware will be cheap enough) for Windows NT. All the Win-98-98-Me releases where in the middle as this mediocre Windows for homes. While Windows 2000 was based on NT, consumers didn’t know if they have to upgrade to Windows Me or Windows 2000 at that time. Finally Microsoft merged all to NT with Windows XP on Oct 2001.
For me it wasn’t that NT was greatest thing when it was released that set the Windows dominance today. It was the platform that Microsoft choose to continue their operating system business for all this time.
@martini
In fact, I am going to say that it is the success of Windows 3.1 and the even bigger follow-up success of Windows 95 that is responsible for the success of Windows on the desktop. And, though NT is great tech, I think it is the success of Windows on the desktop that led to Windows winning on the server (at least for a while).
Windows NT being better tech is why Microsoft chose NT as the base for Windows going forward. But Windows 9x was dramatically more successful in the market. Microsoft launched Windows XP into that momentum. By the time regular people figured out that they were using Windows NT, it was all over.
Few Windows users really “chose” any version of Windows NT. They simply upgraded Windows and NT is what they got.
First time i was introduced to Windows NT 4.0 was at my first job. It was running on the dual pentium 2 scsi desktop of my boss, we used it to drive the powerpoint presentations at the shareholders meetings we produced. It was the smoothest most reliable machine in the office. On any other machine insertion of a video made it choppy but the boss computer could play 8 of them reliably within powerpoint. I installed it on my workstation at the first occasion. My colleague preferred windows 98SE, i suspect he liked taking a break whenever his screen turned blue.
Things have changed tremendously since then.
Haha, PowerPoint crashing over botched up presentations with oversized embedded videos at corporate events sounds so typical.