I laughed so hard at 20:22 when the guy started playing with the thickness of the phallic-looking design. Master troll, of all the shapes he went for that one.
@@KrunchyTheClown78 I know, I was using ME on a vm today, and every program/popup that was on the screen was frozen when I closed the tab. I had to do a restart to fix it. The vm also has problems with the startup chime freezing and playing the same .1 second over and over
Yeah because all the banks and multinationals immediately switched to NT 🧐 oh wait …. They didn’t. In fact it would appear that 3 decades later they’re still relying on COBAL and legacy shite….
And to think that most of us are now watching this on a Windows 10 or 11 system, which is just the latest version of Windows NT. And the stability and multi-tasking performance we enjoy today was there from the start in 1993.
@blendingsentinel4797 how far do you want to go back? Unix on a PDP? But I was talking about NT specifically given it is the OS most people are still using.
@@mornnb I mean Sun systems so more like 80s. They multi-tasked just fine but like I said, not as cheap. You could have gotten SCO UNIX for a WinPC but that's besides the point.
@@blendingsentinel4797 Ok but I was talking about the legacy of Windows NT in modern desktops and laptops... their competitors are not the ancestors of our modern systems.
I used to dual boot my PC in the late 90s with Windows 95 (later 98) and Windows NT 4. I'd use NT for school and Win95 for games. That worked incredibly well for me.
Amazing how little has changed in 30+ years. Sure there's been a ton of updates, improvements and functionality added (mainly cloud and virtualization) but at the end of the day, Windows, which is still the most popular OS on the planet on computers, is still based on the NT framework. Those original developers were very smart dudes.
@@tylertyler82 Nope. The last consumer OS that relied on MS-DOS was Windows Me. Windows XP, Vista, 7, and later are all built on the Windows NT architecture.
@@TheTruthKiwiAnd to add to that, NT was never ran on top of DOS. NT, 2000, XP, etc etc were all based on NT, which did not use DOS under. Windows 3.1 and 9x (95, 98, ME) were all based on DOS.
All of todays' relevant kernels (Linux, Mach-BSD hybrid kernel) are from that time. NT certainly is by far the worst of them. Microsoft is just lazy and cumstomers are dumb, that's what this shows us.
@@bradstewart7007 NT's architecture is heavily inspired by Digital's VMS more than anything else, with the head of VMS development David Cutler having been poached from DEC by Microsoft to lead the development and design of NT. Though the NT kernel could have been the basis for a modernized Microsoft flavor of Unix if that was the way the winds did blow. NT separated the APIs and user environments from the kernel itself into subsystems, and one of the subsystems was a POSIX compatible environment. For a time NT essentially had a Unix distribution of its own via the Services for Unix/Subsystem for Unix Applications package, which extended the POSIX subsystem into a full-blown Unix environment running alongside Win32 which spoke directly to the NT kernel - no emulation involved. SUA was based on BSD sources and it was possible to compile and run pretty much any piece of open source software available at the time. Pair it with an X server and you could even run X11 applications directly on your NT system alongside Win32 applications. As far as the Unix applications knew, they were running on a regular old Unix system. The POSIX subsystem abstracted everything from the NT kernel. Applications executed natively just like any other application running through the Win32 subsystem - yes Windows itself was also just another subsystem to the NT kernel, though arguably the most "official" one. There was also an OS/2 subsystem, though IIRC it never supported GUI OS/2 applications and didn't support anything beyond OS/2 2.x, and was eventually dropped as almost nobody used it. Eventually SUA and the POSIX subsystem was replaced by the virtualized WSL package available in Windows today. This is an example of the modularity and flexibility in the NT architecture that led to us still using it today - it truly was a forward thinking OS design, despite all of the clutter that has been placed on top of it over the years.
@@bradstewart7007Ehhh I’d say the principals are mostly gone by now. Can’t remember the last time “everything” was a file. Plan 9 does that still, it’s why Plan 9 is more Unix than Unix!
Windows NT was the fucking shit. It was so awesome, so stable in a time of really unstable computers. I was maybe 16 or 17 during 1998 when I got a Windows NT 4 workstation from my dad. He worked at Dayrunner, and we were always on computers from an early age. During my high school time when I got this NT computer from my dad, it was my first personal one I kept in my room, and it was amazing. Just stable. Sooooo stable. I learned to build websites and set out of my career path I guess you could say from many of the experiences I had on that computer. It was rock solid. Windows 95 and 98 were notoriously shaky, reboots were always needed, things always seemed to have compatibility issues. But my NT computer was solid as a rock and never gave me trouble and never had to shut down and always performed exceptionally.
We're the same age, and I got my hands on NT4 Workstation the same way! I liked the stability but it was harder to get hardware running with the right drivers, relative to Win98SE. And it definitely ran slower! That same parental unit bought me a boxed version of this bizarre OS/cult membership called RedHat Linux 6.1 that - get this - was FREE but worth supporting with an occasional purchase. Life was never the same, THANKS A LOT DAD. Heh. Seriously, glad I got my feet wet with computing at that particular time. My father was an early adopter of a lot of stuff that sometimes went nowhere but sometimes blew up. He used OS/2 and was a true believer, and was on Compuserve and Usenet when those names and ideas were relegated to the nerdiest .1% of the population.
I remember my high school computer class around the same era had a room full of PCs running Windows NT 4.0. Very stable. Then we got a new teacher who also had some say in how things were configured - for some bewildering reason, he convinced the school to replace NT with Windows 98 - hilarity ensued. We were reassured however that '98 was the way to go, despite having no problems with NT. Some people just have to be control freaks.
Thank you I have a question plz Can i make two programs run at the sam time, like one dos program on background and the ather on windows nt. Because the program on windows nt need that DOS program .
Ahh, those were the days. We were porting engineering applications from HP Apollo and DOS to Windows 3.1. Developing W3.1 software was BRUTAL until Win NT came along. Huge, huge boost in productivity even when targeting W3.1 and Windows-for-Workgroups.
"At Fireman's Fund, system developers prefer IBM's OS/2 Operating System" Sucks for the guy that headed that decision. I wonder if they still have some legacy application running somewhere that's still on OS/2 that some poor guy has to keep running. "It was your idea, Frank, so now you've got to keep it running!" LOL
Retro Active. Exactly, he was so confident. But in 95, two years later, OS/2 misdriven by IBM was fading out quickly. And NT-based systems now run on >90% of PCs. And if nowadays Microsoft were slightly smarter, it would run on most mobile platforms as well. Instead of this sadistic sh!t from google.
Windows NT4 was the first grown up Windows. During my early career I was lucky enough to do some amazing things like roll out central PaaS networks of thousands of thin clients using Citrix based on NT4. It was truly amazing
My first NT version was 4.0 and it was such a huge upgrade from Windows 95 that I never went back to 9x (except for same games, kept a dual boot for those). Windows 11 still is NT, great job done by Cutler's team to create something for the future that we still use everyday, 30 years later.
Windows NT 4.0 was absolute shit, and was incompatible with everything since everything was written for DOS. Nobody wanted it, especially with how difficult it was to customize it. The best Windows NT based operating systems were Windows 2000 and up. Windows 11 is still NT because if they change to a much better kernel, it will be a repeat of MS-DOS abandoning... increase of incompatibility. They did a good job preserving compatibility, even with the transition to 64 bit.
@@judenihal professionals like us wanted NT in the mid 90s. no point in running tools like 3d studio max, maya, lightwave or softimage on plain win95 or win98. too slow, too unstable. some of the professional 3d accelerators (glint, intense 3d, wildcat) also had no working drivers for consumer versions of windows.
@@Dr.W.Krueger for workstations like that, yes, you absolutely need NT 4 because these high performance applications demand so much, but for email, word processing and gaming, windows 98se was used, even in offices. NT was just too expensive to be put on many computers
If you'd worked with an accelerated Amiga around this time, this wasn't so amazing. As a server operating system, yes, it worked well... Most of the time. The biggest issues with NT were the various hardware drivers. Like DOS/Windows 3.1, any hardware not detected (gfx card, sound, etc.), had to be installed manually. That meant juggling the IRQs and addresses on the bus. Plug and play wasn't a thing until Win 95, and it didn't exist server side until Windows 2000.
@@Chordonblue Yeah, Amiga was doing that 7 years before - just shows how bad Commodore were as a company that they completely wasted that head start in the years that followed.
I remember watching this episode as a kid, specifically I clearly remember the demo showing the sql using multiple cpus. I only got a chance to work on a NT machine in '97.
Nice. :D You should make a Workstation, download GCC (to Compile C Code) for Windows, and see if it could work, and make a Server from the Server version! :D
@@joseph_b319 Oof. Well, I guess if it isn't Linux or Unix, I would have trouble setting up an NT-based Server. But now that I've aquired my own copy, I could make a VM and try THAT. :D
I remember being on the beta team for our company testing Windows NT. Probably one of my favorite OS systems and being in IT at the time this was rolled out I could support end-users in my sleep. Ah the Good ole days.
This show was as excellent as all the other The Computer Chronicles shows. I hope The Computer Chronicles will record shows about computers and peripherals that have been used since the early 2000s score.
When they talked about scalability, I had a little chuckle. Yes, it basically means the same thing now, but… And I say this as someone who has worked in IT since the mid 90s. It’s amazing watching stuff like this.
@@Roggocop Suckers are those who don't own and control their data, and leave it up to a benevolent corporation to do so. What happens when you're balls-deep into their ecosystem and they decide not to be so benevolent, but to start charging you big-league for access to your data?
@@Frostie3672 You mean when the Amiga crashed because of a lack of being able to utilize simple memory management? Zero networking functionality? Zilch on user security? Let's face it, the Amiga was good for what it was in 1985 but it was a relic toy by 1993. A cheap gaming toy, at most, to give it credit. But had nothing for a real OS.
Fileserver was absolutely amateur compared with NetWare. Till Sharepoint and OneDrive took over from Fileshares, Microsoft was still behind. Marketing was very good of Microsoft. As usual, Sales people lied to their customers (read managers without IT knowledge)
yeh, they were using the same aggressive tactics with home video game consoles as well. I remeber watching (on RUclips) a colecovision commercial from the 80's that was really putting it to Atari and they made a slogan that said "sorry Atari"
It was called affordance and is a good UX thing. It will come back because it's just the correct way to do UI! Just a matter of time. Flat UI only work with people who have been introduced to it. If you look at NT (and "classical" windows GUI), affordance is high! The only part requiring user to be thaught is the "menu"...because it's flat! The aqua theme of MacOS was great too in that aspect. I always found it graphically impressive at those times.
It’s funny, UIs used to be flat, then as soon as non-monochrome displays became a thing UIs gained 3D elements because they could and it was helpful, and then designers slowly ramped up the 3Dness to the point of ridiculousness (Curves! Refraction!) but then suddenly they all decided that flat is where it’s at and made their elements even flatter than they were in the monochrome days. I suspect the pendulum:will swing again.
Yes, a button back then looked like a damn button! Dialogs looked like dialogs! Idk what I'm clicking these days; everything wants to look like a webpage. From an ui perspective, I miss win7. Hell, from an ui standpoint, I miss win 3 and win95.
True. The microcomputer revolution purposely pushed the standalone computing concept, so users were free of being under the management control of the owner of the server system. Back then it was mostly about costs, not privacy, but the idea was no different than today (more geared towards privacy or the lack of it).
Windows NT was the backbone of every modern windows version included 11, NT was targeted for servers, workstations and super users, it’s become for normal user since 2001 with windows xp set the end of dos based windows
It became also in many offices the standard OS in the second half of the 90s. When I started as a PC supporter in 99 in a huge german corporation all office PCs were running on NT 4 already for years (since NT4 was released in mid 96).
I think Windows NT4 was probably the most stable operating system I've ever used. I was using programs such as AutoCAD and 3D Studio Max on a dual Pentium Pro 150 computer in 1996 and I don't think I ever had a blue screen or lockup over several years.
Stable? LOL!! 1996 Yorktown was used as the testbed for the Navy's Smart Ship program. The ship was equipped with a network of 27 dual 200 MHz Pentium Pro-based machines running Windows NT 4.0 communicating over fiber-optic cable with a Pentium Pro-based server. This network was responsible for running the integrated control center on the bridge, monitoring condition assessment, damage control, machinery control and fuel control, monitoring the engines and navigating the ship. This system was predicted to save $2.8 million per year by reducing the ship's complement by 10%. On 21 September 1997, while on maneuvers off the coast of Cape Charles, Virginia, a crew member entered a zero into a database field causing an attempted division by zero in the ship's Remote Data Base Manager, resulting in a buffer overflow which brought down all the machines on the network, causing the ship's propulsion system to fail.
Imagine todays engineers come to the television and get grilled like that. "Can you show me if your new macbook device can keep its performance and not throttle"
@@comedicsketches how about people who understand that thermal design issue is one of the main problems in today's laptops? The problem is that two laptops with the same processor, may perform quite quite different. Yes, laptops throttle and yes apple pushes firmware updates to fix it. Yup every laptops might get hot and yet, there is a 12 inch macbook which uses throttling as a main cooling mechanism and fails because of that. You miss the point. I would love to see new products demonstrated by product managers/engineers like that and it would be much more interesting thing to see than todays events.
Brings back memories... I remember installing 3dsMax 1.0 on Windows NT 3.5.1.. those were the days. Now on Houdini 19.5.569 and Windows 11 22H2. Windows has never treated be badly. It has always done what I asked of it. Of course I am just a user. Meaning I use Windows as a means to an end.
I had a points of sales (POS) HP comp back then. I took a Visual Basic course and the software came with a NT full install bundle. So I slapped NT on that POS and it gave it new life! Even though the NT was stable there were times that I like to debug, fdisk, format, then reinstall, aka re-slap NT.
I used NT on a Dual 200 MHz Pentium for a while before switching to Windows 2000. The NT interface was the same as windows 3.1 and 2000 was like Windows 95,98. NT (New Technology) worked very well and did not crash like old windows 3.1 but was nearly completely manual when it came to installing Drivers for, printers, video cards or sound cards many of which had to done in the command prompt mode. Those were the days.
@@Patrick_AUBRY wasn't windows 3.5 also like 95/98? either that or i remember it had the option to install the "new shell" aka the windows 95 start menu
NT 3.1/3.5/3.51 had the Windows 3.1/3.11 shell NT 4 had the Windows 95 shell 2000 had the Windows 98 shell However both NT4 and 95 could be updated to the 98/2000 shell by installing IE 4.0x with the "Windows Desktop Update". You needed to install IE4 before newer versions back then, otherwise you wouldn't get the new shell, it was only packaged with IE4 back then.
It's amazing to see video from when all of this was new. I had forgot that MS supported non x86 cpus back then, compare that to how bad Arm based Windows is now. I remember upgrading from NT 3.51 to 4 on a machine at the isp I worked tech support at the time and we were saying it looks just like 95 and were laughing that it asked to eject the disc before restarting. We were completely unaware of cd-rom booting then and the bios didn't even support it, but it wasn't too much later that was common. Amazing to look back and see how much changed from those days.
21:41 1993: 60 seconds per frame 2018: 60 frames per second. I love the way 3D graphics has advanced over the last decades. The great thing is that Windows NT is still around. It is the core of Windows 2000 to Windows 10!
@@alexeysamokhin9629 You can't imagine how long I've waited for Windows to offer out-of-the-box support for multiple virtual desktops. I had to wait for Windows 10.
I am more amazed from 10 000$ monitors sitting atop of each system than the information and visuals. Having those machines in that configs would be pretty classy in those days. But now I am sitting at 55" tv panel as desktop and 6 core Intel, so probably it all ended pretty well in the end. Cheers.
@8:10 Fascinating how we take for granted a 12mb excel file these days and how it can pull data from various sources and complete calculations without giving us time to get a coffee....on your desktop/laptop, not even server hardware. What computing power will we have in 30 years time.
I like how huge those old PC towers are , very impressive looking compared to the tiny small form factor PCs we have today in their dull black boxes, bring back grey colour PCs
1993 was the paradigm shift of the commencing start of Windows NT 3.1 and I was 3 years old at the time and the performance of the server was a little but if boost of the duality of the task based when tasks were performed when scalability as it was in test mode in 1993.
I noticed the host always asks "show me what you can do with this tool". I am waiting to find an episode when the product presenter answers "well that's pretty much it" lol
Them talking about scalability with a OS and seeing a little of what that OS can do on the hardware of it's time and comparing it all to what we have today. Everything they showed my single i9 system would obviously dominate in speed. They talked about just about a minute to render and image where my i9 would take seconds. Technology has come a long way since the early 90's. In 93 I was 7 years old and just played outside. My dad was the one on the computer all the time. I played some games when I was allowed but mostly played outside with the rest of our neighborhood kids.
"Ooh look at me, I have an i9" 🤣 I've seen too much guys just like you, buying a expensive piece of hardware without using it properly,just for epeen,even in the 80's.
@eurocrusader1724 "properly"? 12900k isn't current gen anymore. What are you defining as properly uses anyway? I use my pc for everything from video games to learning computer networking.
It blows my mind how different technology is now vs 30 years ago. And technology changes over the last 30 years is much slower than it will be from now to 30 years from now
I read somewhere that Microsoft would test/update printer drivers by putting hundreds of printers in one huge room the size of a basketball stadium, and then get to work checking each one.
I had to support NT back in 1998 I couldn’t stand it because of the lack of device manager. Nortel used the duel slot 3com pci network card. That pile of crap and no device manager equaled a drinking problem.
I somehow understand what You mean, as the company I worked at back in the day used Windows NT and with Novell Network. That was before they started upgrading the pcs with Windows XP.
As a 9yo nerd my dream was to run NT instead of 3.1 because of all the cool advanced features... A few years later I installed NT 4.0 and none of my friends understood why.
Well they had a point. Not only did NT not give you anything you needed (file permissions, user groups and management and system services) you lost all the benefits of DOS at the time, namely games.
As a 14YO I did the same thing with Win95 and switched to NT4 workstation. Something about having to press Ctrl-Alt-Del to login and having an NTFS partition just felt so right.
@Andrew Tarrant Windows 9x would crap out under heavy workstation load, not very stable. I had a dual boot with NT 4 and Win98 - 98 for gaming, NT for everything else as it was a much more stable OS when running a lot of heavy apps.
Well NT had much higher RAM requirements than Windows 3.x and Win9x and RAM was very expensive at that time. It also wasn't capable to run DOS games and later DirectX and 3d accelerator support was lacking. That's why for me, Windows NT was not an option, when i was a kid and wanted to mainly play games. So my first try with a Windows NT based system was Windows 2000. But the 3dFX drivers for my Voodoo 3 card were so unstable that they drove Windows NT regularly to a blue screen by just opening the file manager. It wasn't the fault of Windows 2000, but this ended my first steps on a Windows NT-based system for the time being. I then switched to Windows Millennium, so the Voodoo 3 card ran very well and the game compatibility was also much higher. I switched to a Windows NT-based system very late with Windows XP. The Service Pack 3 was just released. But then I already had a different graphics card in the computer and the hardware manufacturers tried to get proper support for Windows XP. On the other hand, I was using Linux as a dual booter much earlier than Windows XP. WinME for games and Linux for work.
I laughed so hard at 20:22 when the guy started playing with the thickness of the phallic-looking design. Master troll, of all the shapes he went for that one.
I was looking for this comment. Semi-related but I also find it funny how excited they got over changing colors and making dotted lines disappear.
You mean the girth. 🤣
How about when he said "it gives you the power" while he was making it larger and smaller? That is just nutz. LOL
I was going to have fun with you and call you sick for seeing such a thing. I just watched it and it's hilarious.
💀💀😂😂 did people notice back in day
NT kernel was lifesaver for Microsoft
Yup, without it, they would have been in real trouble after WinME.
@@KrunchyTheClown78 I know, I was using ME on a vm today, and every program/popup that was on the screen was frozen when I closed the tab. I had to do a restart to fix it. The vm also has problems with the startup chime freezing and playing the same .1 second over and over
selami32 They just repackaged much of their OS/2 code and screwed IBM though
@@askhowiknow5527 well yeah it was their code
@@askhowiknow5527 Windows NT kernel is closer to DEC's VMS, not OS/2.
I didn't realise the NTFS dated all the way back to 1993. As a consumer, my first experience of it was within Windows XP.
Yes, it was introduced together with NT to support features like file access permissions, long file names, etc.
The reason why it was called "NT file system" is because it was introduced in the times when the product was called NT ;)
"We're not seriously looking at WIndows NT right now" RIP that business
They're seriously looking at Microsoft Azure right now.
I wonder how long that philosophy lasted.
@@charlesallen4821 As long as OS/2's feasibility, I'd think... So not all that long.
Yeah because all the banks and multinationals immediately switched to NT 🧐 oh wait …. They didn’t. In fact it would appear that 3 decades later they’re still relying on COBAL and legacy shite….
Damn, 11 months late to make the joke.
I wonder what he felt just 2 years later
And to think that most of us are now watching this on a Windows 10 or 11 system, which is just the latest version of Windows NT. And the stability and multi-tasking performance we enjoy today was there from the start in 1993.
It was there before NT but it wasn't quite as cheap. I mean Sun, SGI and others. These was SCO OpenUNIX but it didn't get a lot of installs.
@blendingsentinel4797 how far do you want to go back? Unix on a PDP? But I was talking about NT specifically given it is the OS most people are still using.
@@mornnb I mean Sun systems so more like 80s. They multi-tasked just fine but like I said, not as cheap. You could have gotten SCO UNIX for a WinPC but that's besides the point.
@@blendingsentinel4797 Ok but I was talking about the legacy of Windows NT in modern desktops and laptops... their competitors are not the ancestors of our modern systems.
@@mornnb Ah I get what you mean.
The show and the people involved are legends in the pc industry. Thank you for a fantastic show Stewart.
Yes, where would we be without Bill Gates and other programmers, thanks and kind regards.
I used to dual boot my PC in the late 90s with Windows 95 (later 98) and Windows NT 4. I'd use NT for school and Win95 for games. That worked incredibly well for me.
Yeah, loved it too. But even better when NT became windows 2000 which -if I remember correctly- supported much more PnP hardware.
@@b1lleman Yeah I used Windows 2000 at one of my first jobs. It was very solid compared to the alternatives at the time (Windows ME and Mac OS 9).
To this day, NT 4 is still my all time favorite OS.
Yeah, loved it too. But even better when NT became windows 2000 which if I remember correctly supported much more PnP hardware.
To this day, we use file system from July 1993 NTFS, jubilee 30 years
@hungrydragowindows 11 is based on NT
@@Douglas_HamiltonWin95, 98 and Me are NOT based on NT!
Amazing how little has changed in 30+ years. Sure there's been a ton of updates, improvements and functionality added (mainly cloud and virtualization) but at the end of the day, Windows, which is still the most popular OS on the planet on computers, is still based on the NT framework.
Those original developers were very smart dudes.
They took the concepts from mainframe computers. The NT team came straight from DEC.
Actually it’s all built on top of DOS.
@@tylertyler82 Nope. The last consumer OS that relied on MS-DOS was Windows Me. Windows XP, Vista, 7, and later are all built on the Windows NT architecture.
@@TheTruthKiwiAnd to add to that, NT was never ran on top of DOS. NT, 2000, XP, etc etc were all based on NT, which did not use DOS under.
Windows 3.1 and 9x (95, 98, ME) were all based on DOS.
@@tylertyler82It's crazy how people act like authorities on things they know nothing about.
and never forget--dont copy that floppy!!!
yeah.. rip that blueray and upload it instead!
Plus: Never forget that you can talk with them.... ON-LINE..... ON COMPUSERVE!!
@@ramireza6904 compuserve was the shiznitz.. for like 4 months
f0k u
dont rip that ray
And to think 30 years later, modern versions of Windows are still based on NT. Tells you how good of a base it is.
I agree ,brilliant ❤ from portugal
All of todays' relevant kernels (Linux, Mach-BSD hybrid kernel) are from that time. NT certainly is by far the worst of them. Microsoft is just lazy and cumstomers are dumb, that's what this shows us.
Much like every other mainstream operating system based on the principles of Unix from the early 70s.
@@bradstewart7007 NT's architecture is heavily inspired by Digital's VMS more than anything else, with the head of VMS development David Cutler having been poached from DEC by Microsoft to lead the development and design of NT.
Though the NT kernel could have been the basis for a modernized Microsoft flavor of Unix if that was the way the winds did blow. NT separated the APIs and user environments from the kernel itself into subsystems, and one of the subsystems was a POSIX compatible environment. For a time NT essentially had a Unix distribution of its own via the Services for Unix/Subsystem for Unix Applications package, which extended the POSIX subsystem into a full-blown Unix environment running alongside Win32 which spoke directly to the NT kernel - no emulation involved. SUA was based on BSD sources and it was possible to compile and run pretty much any piece of open source software available at the time. Pair it with an X server and you could even run X11 applications directly on your NT system alongside Win32 applications.
As far as the Unix applications knew, they were running on a regular old Unix system. The POSIX subsystem abstracted everything from the NT kernel. Applications executed natively just like any other application running through the Win32 subsystem - yes Windows itself was also just another subsystem to the NT kernel, though arguably the most "official" one. There was also an OS/2 subsystem, though IIRC it never supported GUI OS/2 applications and didn't support anything beyond OS/2 2.x, and was eventually dropped as almost nobody used it.
Eventually SUA and the POSIX subsystem was replaced by the virtualized WSL package available in Windows today.
This is an example of the modularity and flexibility in the NT architecture that led to us still using it today - it truly was a forward thinking OS design, despite all of the clutter that has been placed on top of it over the years.
@@bradstewart7007Ehhh I’d say the principals are mostly gone by now. Can’t remember the last time “everything” was a file. Plan 9 does that still, it’s why Plan 9 is more Unix than Unix!
It's weird thinking that a few years ago Windows NT was something shiny and new when nowadays it is running in probably billions of machines
I remember when this show was on and I remember all these shows that aired back then. My how far we've come.
windows NT was supposed to look like win 3.1 how scary
I'm scared hold me
@@vardekpetrovic9716 no no no nt was just another version of windows 10 silly
Windows NT was the fucking shit.
It was so awesome, so stable in a time of really unstable computers. I was maybe 16 or 17 during 1998 when I got a Windows NT 4 workstation from my dad. He worked at Dayrunner, and we were always on computers from an early age. During my high school time when I got this NT computer from my dad, it was my first personal one I kept in my room, and it was amazing. Just stable. Sooooo stable.
I learned to build websites and set out of my career path I guess you could say from many of the experiences I had on that computer.
It was rock solid. Windows 95 and 98 were notoriously shaky, reboots were always needed, things always seemed to have compatibility issues. But my NT computer was solid as a rock and never gave me trouble and never had to shut down and always performed exceptionally.
We're the same age, and I got my hands on NT4 Workstation the same way! I liked the stability but it was harder to get hardware running with the right drivers, relative to Win98SE. And it definitely ran slower! That same parental unit bought me a boxed version of this bizarre OS/cult membership called RedHat Linux 6.1 that - get this - was FREE but worth supporting with an occasional purchase. Life was never the same, THANKS A LOT DAD. Heh. Seriously, glad I got my feet wet with computing at that particular time. My father was an early adopter of a lot of stuff that sometimes went nowhere but sometimes blew up. He used OS/2 and was a true believer, and was on Compuserve and Usenet when those names and ideas were relegated to the nerdiest .1% of the population.
I remember my high school computer class around the same era had a room full of PCs running Windows NT 4.0. Very stable. Then we got a new teacher who also had some say in how things were configured - for some bewildering reason, he convinced the school to replace NT with Windows 98 - hilarity ensued. We were reassured however that '98 was the way to go, despite having no problems with NT. Some people just have to be control freaks.
It was fucking shit all right...
@@vinhtran9308 Windows has always been shit
Thank you
I have a question plz
Can i make two programs run at the sam time, like one dos program on background and the ather on windows nt. Because the program on windows nt need that DOS program .
Starting from about 19:30 they manage to show a phallus on screen for over a minute while maintaining complete seriousness.
Amazing how advanced dildo design was back then.
😂😂😂 Lmfao 😂😂😂
Ahh, those were the days. We were porting engineering applications from HP Apollo and DOS to Windows 3.1. Developing W3.1 software was BRUTAL until Win NT came along. Huge, huge boost in productivity even when targeting W3.1 and Windows-for-Workgroups.
Windows NT was more of a POC. Windows 2000 was the first version of Windows that I found to be worthwhile.
"At Fireman's Fund, system developers prefer IBM's OS/2 Operating System" Sucks for the guy that headed that decision. I wonder if they still have some legacy application running somewhere that's still on OS/2 that some poor guy has to keep running. "It was your idea, Frank, so now you've got to keep it running!" LOL
Retro Active Actually most atms are running OS/2 and XP
I've heard of industrial machines still running MS-DOS. And I'm not talking nice DOS 6.22 Oh no, DOS 3 is the thing!
Retro Active. Exactly, he was so confident. But in 95, two years later, OS/2 misdriven by IBM was fading out quickly. And NT-based systems now run on >90% of PCs. And if nowadays Microsoft were slightly smarter, it would run on most mobile platforms as well. Instead of this sadistic sh!t from google.
Frankie and Bennys use NT 4 on their terminals
This was still the wild west of operating systems I doubt no one at the time knew windows was going to come out on top in the end
Windows NT4 was the first grown up Windows. During my early career I was lucky enough to do some amazing things like roll out central PaaS networks of thousands of thin clients using Citrix based on NT4. It was truly amazing
tf is paas? Pornography as a service? Pizza and a sandwich? Peers as associated shitheads? Elaborate
Only problem with your comment is this has absolutely nothing to do with NT4. This episode Is all about NT3/3.5
@@AureliusR so what?
Buggy as hell from my first experience.
@@tr1p1ea NT 3.x was pretty rough. NT4 provided you treated it with respect when it comes to drivers, it was next gen
My first NT version was 4.0 and it was such a huge upgrade from Windows 95 that I never went back to 9x (except for same games, kept a dual boot for those).
Windows 11 still is NT, great job done by Cutler's team to create something for the future that we still use everyday, 30 years later.
Well, i use Linux everyday.
The only exception is for some games for which i keep Windows 10 as a dual boot setup.
Windows NT 4.0 was absolute shit, and was incompatible with everything since everything was written for DOS. Nobody wanted it, especially with how difficult it was to customize it. The best Windows NT based operating systems were Windows 2000 and up.
Windows 11 is still NT because if they change to a much better kernel, it will be a repeat of MS-DOS abandoning... increase of incompatibility. They did a good job preserving compatibility, even with the transition to 64 bit.
@@judenihal
professionals like us wanted NT in the mid 90s. no point in running tools like 3d studio max, maya, lightwave or softimage on plain win95 or win98. too slow, too unstable. some of the professional 3d accelerators (glint, intense 3d, wildcat) also had no working drivers for consumer versions of windows.
@@Dr.W.Krueger for workstations like that, yes, you absolutely need NT 4 because these high performance applications demand so much, but for email, word processing and gaming, windows 98se was used, even in offices. NT was just too expensive to be put on many computers
The person talking about Cairo really demonstrates the difference between program and product management
I remember running multiple simultaneous applications (animations) and being amazed at how well NT 4 handled them versus Windows 95, etc.
I gotta a good feeling about this windows nt thing I think it's going to be Huge!
@@raven4k998 Bah! It'll never take off!
@@TH3C001 ok buy me a new tesla model 3 performance then
If you'd worked with an accelerated Amiga around this time, this wasn't so amazing. As a server operating system, yes, it worked well... Most of the time. The biggest issues with NT were the various hardware drivers. Like DOS/Windows 3.1, any hardware not detected (gfx card, sound, etc.), had to be installed manually. That meant juggling the IRQs and addresses on the bus. Plug and play wasn't a thing until Win 95, and it didn't exist server side until Windows 2000.
@@Chordonblue Yeah, Amiga was doing that 7 years before - just shows how bad Commodore were as a company that they completely wasted that head start in the years that followed.
I had a old HP back in the 9-8, slapped NT on it that came for free with Visual Basic, and it was truly the best Microsoft OS!
NT4.0 was rock solid. Impossible to get pcmcia cards working, but was a great OS
I remember watching this episode as a kid, specifically I clearly remember the demo showing the sql using multiple cpus. I only got a chance to work on a NT machine in '97.
I scored myself an unopened copy of Windows NT 4.0 and Server 3.51 on Ebay.
Nice. :D You should make a Workstation, download GCC (to Compile C Code) for Windows, and see if it could work, and make a Server from the Server version! :D
blackneos940 id like to install it on a pc, but that last part is above my pay grade.
I have thrown SO many of those away lol
@@joseph_b319 Oof. Well, I guess if it isn't Linux or Unix, I would have trouble setting up an NT-based Server. But now that I've aquired my own copy, I could make a VM and try THAT. :D
I have a sealed copy of Windows 95 in my closet
I remember being on the beta team for our company testing Windows NT. Probably one of my favorite OS systems and being in IT at the time this was rolled out I could support end-users in my sleep.
Ah the Good ole days.
in soviet russia, the end users support the OS when it goes to sleep :)
The times when Windows was more uniformed and aesthetically pleasing than today.
Windows was always ugly af to my eyes
But then again, I was more into amigas and macs back in the 90's
@@ElShogoso what ever floats your boat dude
No it wasn't
Poor Cairo, this video is awesome. David Cutler's team did great work!
I love how they balanced talking about the benefits of NT with the capabilities of Unix and OS/2. It's a balance that you [sadly] wouldn't see today.
This show was as excellent as all the other The Computer Chronicles shows. I hope The Computer Chronicles will record shows about computers and peripherals that have been used since the early 2000s score.
1000 years later, and to this very day I am still copying that floppy. Sue me SPA!
Even with modern GPUs, no other Windows edition matched the smoothness with which the mouse cursor could be moved in NT4.
I love watching this kind of material.
remember to buy an activator from sage for your games dude it's the future I can feel it
When they talked about scalability, I had a little chuckle. Yes, it basically means the same thing now, but… And I say this as someone who has worked in IT since the mid 90s. It’s amazing watching stuff like this.
look at that massive tower!! Nothing says performance like a massive tower lol...
Tower of power!
Glorious days of local storage, you need that beast for all those 20MB hard drives. :)
Says you. I still save everything. Streaming is for suckers who like paying for data.
+John Suckers are those who pay for data.
@@Roggocop Suckers are those who don't own and control their data, and leave it up to a benevolent corporation to do so. What happens when you're balls-deep into their ecosystem and they decide not to be so benevolent, but to start charging you big-league for access to your data?
Windows NT was an absolute beast for its age. There was absolutely NOTHING like it around.
Well, DEC had some tech that was at least equally powerful on Alpha: Tru64 and OpenVMS were titans of the era.
Totally disagree, the amiga & workbench operating system was so much better than what the pc had at the time.
@@Frostie3672 You mean when the Amiga crashed because of a lack of being able to utilize simple memory management? Zero networking functionality? Zilch on user security? Let's face it, the Amiga was good for what it was in 1985 but it was a relic toy by 1993. A cheap gaming toy, at most, to give it credit. But had nothing for a real OS.
Least factual comment of all time op, nt was microsoft slapshodily implementing good ideas from real oses
Fileserver was absolutely amateur compared with NetWare. Till Sharepoint and OneDrive took over from Fileshares, Microsoft was still behind. Marketing was very good of Microsoft. As usual, Sales people lied to their customers (read managers without IT knowledge)
I remember seeing a poster at a computer store back in Summer of 1993 that was a commercial for OS/2. It said that the "NT" stood for "nice try". LOL
yeh, they were using the same aggressive tactics with home video game consoles as well. I remeber watching (on RUclips) a colecovision commercial from the 80's that was really putting it to Atari and they made a slogan that said "sorry Atari"
@@BraveFencerLinkMakenshi Genesis does what Nintendon't!
@@matthewhall6288 Was gonna reply exactly that lol
I'm really missing 3D elements in modern operating systems.
It was called affordance and is a good UX thing. It will come back because it's just the correct way to do UI! Just a matter of time.
Flat UI only work with people who have been introduced to it.
If you look at NT (and "classical" windows GUI), affordance is high! The only part requiring user to be thaught is the "menu"...because it's flat!
The aqua theme of MacOS was great too in that aspect. I always found it graphically impressive at those times.
I recently watched a video of IOS 6. Everyone said "just give the new UI a chance, you'll like it better once you're used to it."
Nope.
@@nickwallette6201 you mean 7 right?
It’s funny, UIs used to be flat, then as soon as non-monochrome displays became a thing UIs gained 3D elements because they could and it was helpful, and then designers slowly ramped up the 3Dness to the point of ridiculousness (Curves! Refraction!) but then suddenly they all decided that flat is where it’s at and made their elements even flatter than they were in the monochrome days. I suspect the pendulum:will swing again.
Yes, a button back then looked like a damn button! Dialogs looked like dialogs! Idk what I'm clicking these days; everything wants to look like a webpage.
From an ui perspective, I miss win7. Hell, from an ui standpoint, I miss win 3 and win95.
Happy 30th Birthday Windows NT!
Thank you for this informational interview-show,called The Computer Chronicles, Kind regards.
I remember this show back in the day...I used to watch it all the time. 😊
That was back when Novell ruled the network world. Good times.
Novell will rise again!
People still don't realize that "the cloud" was invented in like the late 70ths, and that it was re-hyped in the nineties. (ca 14:15)
True. The microcomputer revolution purposely pushed the standalone computing concept, so users were free of being under the management control of the owner of the server system. Back then it was mostly about costs, not privacy, but the idea was no different than today (more geared towards privacy or the lack of it).
I wish this show still went on
The ladies certainly do if you skip to 19 min mark LMAO it looks like a Penis ha ha
Windows NT was the backbone of every modern windows version included 11, NT was targeted for servers, workstations and super users, it’s become for normal user since 2001 with windows xp set the end of dos based windows
It became also in many offices the standard OS in the second half of the 90s. When I started as a PC supporter in 99 in a huge german corporation all office PCs were running on NT 4 already for years (since NT4 was released in mid 96).
Say what you want, but the bearded Unix guy is still the coolest kid today, with his SGI Indigo 😎
SGIs were awesome.
@@user-bz9sj8mh5d yeah with there flight simulator os's those things looked so cool
Amazing that he even developed the software he used for art.
NT Kernel is still around. It got folded into Windows 7, 8, and 10.
why wouldn't it it was a very good Kernel
@@raven4k998 yeah
I loved NT, it was reliable, fast and had a clean interface. ❤
it still is
The great granddaddy of modern Windows you're using right now.
Forward 30 years later and we’re going back to RISC again, because RISC is king
Uh, it never left and you might want to check how modern x86 works.
The x86 is RISC since the Pentium Pro. It does use microops to do the x86 operations.
I think Windows NT4 was probably the most stable operating system I've ever used. I was using programs such as AutoCAD and 3D Studio Max on a dual Pentium Pro 150 computer in 1996 and I don't think I ever had a blue screen or lockup over several years.
Stable? LOL!!
1996 Yorktown was used as the testbed for the Navy's Smart Ship program. The ship was equipped with a network of 27 dual 200 MHz Pentium Pro-based machines running Windows NT 4.0 communicating over fiber-optic cable with a Pentium Pro-based server. This network was responsible for running the integrated control center on the bridge, monitoring condition assessment, damage control, machinery control and fuel control, monitoring the engines and navigating the ship. This system was predicted to save $2.8 million per year by reducing the ship's complement by 10%.
On 21 September 1997, while on maneuvers off the coast of Cape Charles, Virginia, a crew member entered a zero into a database field causing an attempted division by zero in the ship's Remote Data Base Manager, resulting in a buffer overflow which brought down all the machines on the network, causing the ship's propulsion system to fail.
I like watching videos like this on my 3:2 ratio display. The aspect ratio of the video fills up most of the screen. Really nice.
I used an NT4 box in ‘99 on one of the first PC based NLE’s. It was so stable and it all just worked.
The story of NT is interesting, there's a book about it called, 'Showstopper'
Imagine todays engineers come to the television and get grilled like that. "Can you show me if your new macbook device can keep its performance and not throttle"
Well, they’re not demonstrating with a laptop are they? Most laptops throttle. x86 as a laptop CPU won’t be around much longer.
@@TheSteveSteele most nowadays apple laptops throttle, that's true und thats exactly the point. But there is no one to answer the question.
@@comedicsketches how about people who understand that thermal design issue is one of the main problems in today's laptops? The problem is that two laptops with the same processor, may perform quite quite different. Yes, laptops throttle and yes apple pushes firmware updates to fix it. Yup every laptops might get hot and yet, there is a 12 inch macbook which uses throttling as a main cooling mechanism and fails because of that. You miss the point. I would love to see new products demonstrated by product managers/engineers like that and it would be much more interesting thing to see than todays events.
Thats why Apple go for Apple silicon.
I never got to play with NT4 but when I upgraded (3.11 - 98SE - 2000) I immediately loved 2000, stable, fast and powerful.
Brings back memories... I remember installing 3dsMax 1.0 on Windows NT 3.5.1.. those were the days. Now on Houdini 19.5.569 and Windows 11 22H2. Windows has never treated be badly. It has always done what I asked of it. Of course I am just a user. Meaning I use Windows as a means to an end.
I loved this show.
At least you were lucky enough to see it when it was airing.
Amazing the things we just take for granted
i remember this when my dad took me to work I think in 94, I was 8 and just played with the afterdark screensavers, good times
I had a points of sales (POS) HP comp back then. I took a Visual Basic course and the software came with a NT full install bundle. So I slapped NT on that POS and it gave it new life! Even though the NT was stable there were times that I like to debug, fdisk, format, then reinstall, aka re-slap NT.
For anyone younger than 35, Windows NT is still alive - Windows 11 is merely another successor to this great OS.
I used NT on a Dual 200 MHz Pentium for a while before switching to Windows 2000. The NT interface was the same as windows 3.1 and 2000 was like Windows 95,98. NT (New Technology) worked very well and did not crash like old windows 3.1 but was nearly completely manual when it came to installing Drivers for, printers, video cards or sound cards many of which had to done in the command prompt mode. Those were the days.
Windows NT 4.0 before 2000 was like Win 98
@@Patrick_AUBRY wasn't windows 3.5 also like 95/98? either that or i remember it had the option to install the "new shell" aka the windows 95 start menu
NT 3.1/3.5/3.51 had the Windows 3.1/3.11 shell
NT 4 had the Windows 95 shell
2000 had the Windows 98 shell
However both NT4 and 95 could be updated to the 98/2000 shell by installing IE 4.0x with the "Windows Desktop Update". You needed to install IE4 before newer versions back then, otherwise you wouldn't get the new shell, it was only packaged with IE4 back then.
@@Lofote Windows NT 3.x has Windows 3.1 shell, NT4 had Windows 95 shell, Windows 2000 had Windows ME shell.
@@judenihal 2000 came before ME, so if at all ME had a lousy copy of the 2000 shell (minus the font). ;)
Back when Microsoft tried to make new versions of Windows look like old ones...
It's amazing to see video from when all of this was new. I had forgot that MS supported non x86 cpus back then, compare that to how bad Arm based Windows is now.
I remember upgrading from NT 3.51 to 4 on a machine at the isp I worked tech support at the time and we were saying it looks just like 95 and were laughing that it asked to eject the disc before restarting. We were completely unaware of cd-rom booting then and the bios didn't even support it, but it wasn't too much later that was common. Amazing to look back and see how much changed from those days.
Blockbuster CD rom movies oh boy how times have changed dam I'm old
21:41 1993: 60 seconds per frame 2018: 60 frames per second. I love the way 3D graphics has advanced over the last decades.
The great thing is that Windows NT is still around. It is the core of Windows 2000 to Windows 10!
and Windows XP, Vista, 7 and so on. Windows 95 and 98 and definately M.E were abhominations.
I still use and love 98 SE
if you want to use also Dos regularly and have zero issues it's nice to have a win 98 machine of that era
@@MF175mp With DOSBOX I see no use in running DOS at all anymore physically ;)..
@@Lofote I see
I was one of the first CNE and MCSE types. Those were the days. NT 3.51 was bulletproof.
I used to love this show.
This UI is actually extremely intuitive and pretty.
Last 15 years of UI “innovation” was in fact a degradation.
@@alexeysamokhin9629 You can't imagine how long I've waited for Windows to offer out-of-the-box support for multiple virtual desktops. I had to wait for Windows 10.
I still using win nt 4 workstation
@Невада большевик don't you mean Windows NT 6.4?
@@HBC101TVStudios What are you using, the old ass expired Tech Previews? Open cmd and it will say Version 10.0.whatever
@@powershellaxp64 Wiem, że to NT 10.0. I'm just tricking him with the original NT version of Windows 10 😂
@@HBC101TVStudios Oh great, you trolled me too. But this makes me wonder how would Windows 10 end up if it never changed the kernel version to 10.0.
@@HBC101TVStudios
Windows 10 = Windows NT 10.
WIndows 8.1 = Windows NT 6.3
2:02 Woh, that NT computer has a combo 3.5"/5.25" drive! I did not know that they made such drives back in 1993!
I am more amazed from 10 000$ monitors sitting atop of each system than the information and visuals.
Having those machines in that configs would be pretty classy in those days. But now I am sitting at 55" tv panel as desktop and 6 core Intel, so probably it all ended pretty well in the end. Cheers.
buy gkasses fre ³d 55 íñch ³d tv gksßes fre
I love how the sponsors actually show a street address and no website url.
What's a "website" :)
Ahhaaahah, that right, good old days...
Unix users look all the same... long hair + big beard
I'm bald.
GeoNeilUK so, u Windows ?
NameIst Unbekannt
No
propably mac user lol
there was an old dilbert cartoon about this - the bearded long-haired unix guy tells dilbert, "here's 25 cents, kid. Go get yourself a real OS."
@8:10 Fascinating how we take for granted a 12mb excel file these days and how it can pull data from various sources and complete calculations without giving us time to get a coffee....on your desktop/laptop, not even server hardware.
What computing power will we have in 30 years time.
I loved all of this.
How about that Sega Activator at the end. AVGN and Keith Apicary recently made a video highlighting its functionality... or lack thereof.
"recently"
that hurts
Man i love the 1990's!!
I like how huge those old PC towers are , very impressive looking compared to the tiny small form factor PCs we have today in their dull black boxes, bring back grey colour PCs
11:39 Little did that guest know that "SharePoint" would become the name of a crucial Microsoft product a few years later. :)
1993 was the paradigm shift of the commencing start of Windows NT 3.1 and I was 3 years old at the time and the performance of the server was a little but if boost of the duality of the task based when tasks were performed when scalability as it was in test mode in 1993.
Mike Nash is my uncle! Absolute legend
2:20, to be honest, I'm missing those old days were graphics on the user interface were simpler...
Crazy how nothing has changed
so it is exactly 30 years ago... I still can't imagine 20 or 30 years later from today, the microSD card is like 4000TB and it is US$20
I noticed the host always asks "show me what you can do with this tool". I am waiting to find an episode when the product presenter answers "well that's pretty much it" lol
They wouldn't be a very good presenter if they replied with that lol
the host always grates on my nerves by being so pushy and impatient. it's annoying.
Them talking about scalability with a OS and seeing a little of what that OS can do on the hardware of it's time and comparing it all to what we have today. Everything they showed my single i9 system would obviously dominate in speed. They talked about just about a minute to render and image where my i9 would take seconds. Technology has come a long way since the early 90's. In 93 I was 7 years old and just played outside. My dad was the one on the computer all the time. I played some games when I was allowed but mostly played outside with the rest of our neighborhood kids.
"Ooh look at me, I have an i9"
🤣
I've seen too much guys just like you, buying a expensive piece of hardware without using it properly,just for epeen,even in the 80's.
@eurocrusader1724 "properly"? 12900k isn't current gen anymore. What are you defining as properly uses anyway? I use my pc for everything from video games to learning computer networking.
It blows my mind how different technology is now vs 30 years ago. And technology changes over the last 30 years is much slower than it will be from now to 30 years from now
12MB is a gigantic spreadsheet.
If only they knew...
...how poorly we manage memory today.
i wonder how much it would suck being an engineer at microsoft, trying to get drivers to work, trying to get it usable for different computers etc...
I read somewhere that Microsoft would test/update printer drivers by putting hundreds of printers in one huge room the size of a basketball stadium, and then get to work checking each one.
The Virtuoso application demo'd at 16:10 was never released.
Sometimes miss these old days
Nostalgia 😊
I remember early 2000 my first CAD Application on Windows 98 SP2.. What an amazing time..
Wow! Really forgot how big computer towers used to be!
I've still got one that big. Has four hard drives and a tape drive in it.
I had to support NT back in 1998 I couldn’t stand it because of the lack of device manager. Nortel used the duel slot 3com pci network card. That pile of crap and no device manager equaled a drinking problem.
Network and sound cards were nearly impossible to configure correctly in NT 4. I don't miss those days at all.
I somehow understand what You mean, as the company I worked at back in the day used Windows NT and with Novell Network. That was before they started upgrading the pcs with Windows XP.
Imagine creating updates and then shipping them in a box of 3.5 floppies.
Computers were so amazing back then.
As a 9yo nerd my dream was to run NT instead of 3.1 because of all the cool advanced features... A few years later I installed NT 4.0 and none of my friends understood why.
Well they had a point. Not only did NT not give you anything you needed (file permissions, user groups and management and system services) you lost all the benefits of DOS at the time, namely games.
As a 14YO I did the same thing with Win95 and switched to NT4 workstation. Something about having to press Ctrl-Alt-Del to login and having an NTFS partition just felt so right.
@Andrew Tarrant Windows 9x would crap out under heavy workstation load, not very stable. I had a dual boot with NT 4 and Win98 - 98 for gaming, NT for everything else as it was a much more stable OS when running a lot of heavy apps.
Well NT had much higher RAM requirements than Windows 3.x and Win9x and RAM was very expensive at that time.
It also wasn't capable to run DOS games and later DirectX and 3d accelerator support was lacking.
That's why for me, Windows NT was not an option, when i was a kid and wanted to mainly play games.
So my first try with a Windows NT based system was Windows 2000. But the 3dFX drivers for my Voodoo 3 card were so unstable that they drove Windows NT regularly to a blue screen by just opening the file manager.
It wasn't the fault of Windows 2000, but this ended my first steps on a Windows NT-based system for the time being. I then switched to Windows Millennium, so the Voodoo 3 card ran very well and the game compatibility was also much higher.
I switched to a Windows NT-based system very late with Windows XP. The Service Pack 3 was just released. But then I already had a different graphics card in the computer and the hardware manufacturers tried to get proper support for Windows XP.
On the other hand, I was using Linux as a dual booter much earlier than Windows XP.
WinME for games and Linux for work.
@@BlownMacTruck and starting with Windows 2000, gaming on NT started to be possible, thanks to support for same DirectX versions as Windows 9x
Don't copy that floppy :)
NT 4 was so good!!!
Novell, now there's a name I haven't heard in ages