Have you ever wanted to read the original design documents underlying the Windows NT operating system?
This binder contains the original design specifications for “NT OS/2,” an operating system designed by Microsoft that developed into Windows NT. In the late 1980s, Microsoft’s 16-bit operating system, Windows, gained popularity, prompting IBM and Microsoft to end their OS/2 development partnership. Although Windows 3.0 proved to be successful, Microsoft wished to continue developing a 32-bit operating system completely unrelated to IBM’s OS/2 architecture. To head the redesign project, Microsoft hired David Cutler and others away from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Unlike Windows 3.x and its successor, Windows 95, NT’s technology provided better network support, making it the preferred Windows environment for businesses. These two product lines continued development as separate entities until they were merged with the release of Windows XP in 2001.
↫ Object listing at the Smithsonian
The actual binder is housed in the Smithsonian, although it’s not currently on display. Luckily for us, a collection of Word and PDF files encompassing the entire book is available online for your perusal. Reading these documents will allow you to peel back over three decades of Microsoft’s terrible stewardship of Windows NT layer by layer, eventually ending up at the original design and intent as laid out by Dave Cutler, Helen Custer, Daryl E. Havens, Jim Kelly, Edwin Hoogerbeets, Gary D. Kimura, Chuck Lenzmeier, Mark Lucovsky, Tom Miller, Michael J. O’Leary, Lou Perazzoli, Steven D. Rowe, David Treadwell, Steven R. Wood, and more.
A fantastic time capsule we should be thrilled to still have access to.
They actually “half” delivered that promise, too.
Original NT systems, being a micro kernel, natively supported OS/2 executables out of the box.
Yes, NT was not a “Windows”. The WIN32 API on top of it was just a “persona”. They kept the OS/2 persona. but only for command line applications. Unfortunately Presentation Manager was not there, so no UI applications worked.
(They also had their XENIX / UNIX persona, and NT was POSIX compliant long before any version Linux. They later had Linux kernel persona in WSL1.0 and Linux programs also run “natively” on NT during Windows 10 era. Later they switched to an emulation based version in WSL2.0 as direct translation of syscalls turned out to be not as performant as they expected. Especially for I/O. Turns out NTFS was not a good fit).
Anyway, if IBM was not so stubborn, and insisted on paying by “lines of code”, we would be in a very different world now.