5 ms·

For anybody that used to work professionally back in the 90s, I want to ask: Was Windows NT a good OS? My professor in University was a hardcore Linux fan, but

For anybody that used to work professionally back in the 90s, I want to ask: Was Windows NT a good OS? My professor in University was a hardcore Linux fan, but he used to praise NT saying it was the best thing Microsoft did.

GrumpyYoungMan 4y ago
Depends on what you mean by "good OS". Architecturally, it was a descendant of VMS and its kernel was considered well engineered for its time. It had a ton of bugs and security issues but so did all the pre-2.0 Linux kernels/distributions that were its contemporary. From the userland and UI perspective, well, it's just Windows, both in the positive and negative sense; NT is the granddady of Windows XP and Windows 7 both of which were well regarded but NT also suffered from all the warts and ugliness caused by being converted into a consumer OS.
GauntletWizard 4y ago
NT5/Windows 2000 was a huge leap forward for Microsoft in terms of design model and security. NT5.1/Windows XP had some iterative improvements and some things going backwards. NT4 was better than 95 in every way, but was merely mediocre. Microsoft's suite of workplace tools that ran on NT4 were janky and broken, requiring their own college degree to set up and administer, but they also represented a real productivity boost for many teams.
ethbr0 4y ago
It's the best thing Microsoft ever did... compared to the other things Microsoft did at the time. Microsoft has always had a shit ton of extremely smart people, mired in two shit tons of middling execs. Windows NT was what happened when the product / political side of the company ignored the technologists for a bit.
jedberg 4y ago
I liked windows NT so much I traveled an hour on public transit to stand in a two hour line to get a beta copy of Windows NT 4, and ran it as my daily driver (upgrading to non-beta) until I just switched to Linux (and then the first version of MacOS X). This was after I tried to take the NT 3.51 kernel and marry it with the Win95 UI (that didn't work).
- anyfoo 4y ago
  > This was after I tried to take the NT 3.51 kernel and marry it with the Win95 UI (that didn't work). How in C:\>'s name would that have been possible? Windows 95 was an unholy mixture of 16bit code running in vm86 mode interleaved with 32bit code, and nearly full Windows 3.1 compatibility even in lower level aspects. NT was a relatively clean full 32bit reimplementation. Was the UI part so cleanly separated to have a chance at that? (Not what my impression was, but I really never dived that deep into Windows.)
  - jedberg 4y ago
    It couldn’t. :) I was dumb and naive and just tried to replace the kernel on win95 with the WinNT kernel. Like just the one sys file. After booting it just sat there like “what in C:\>’s name have you done to me?!”
    - anyfoo 4y ago
      > I was dumb and naive and just tried to replace the kernel on win95 with the WinNT kernel. Hahah, I'd be lying if I said that I didn't do equally naive stuff back in the day, I know exactly what your kind of thinking was. It's almost sad, because understanding takes the magic away. I sort of miss looking at computers with the eyes of a child and wondering what lies behind the abstractions...
      - jedberg 4y ago
        I have an even better dumb story. Right after high school I visited my friend at Berkeley, and while there I wrote down his IP address. When I got home I changed my IP to be a different one on the same subnet and matched the gateway address. I knew what a subnet was, I knew what a router was, but I didn’t realize you can’t just reach any router you want. I figured if I did that I could get all the stuff that was restricted to the Berkeley network. Needless to say it didn’t work.
        ianmcgowan 4y ago
actionfromafar 4y ago
NT 3.x did not have the video driver in kernel, so it was extremely stable. I liked it a lot at school, felt silky smooth on the 486DX66 in the lab.
Goleniewski 4y ago
It was light and day. It is what it is because of the man in charge. Billy G knew that even he didn't have the skills to manage the development of NT. Therefore he got a guy called Dave Cutler to head it up. Dave was the man because he used to work for DEC on a project called Onyx and prism (A hardware/software combo to do essentially what NT does) was cancelled by DEC at the last minute. MS wanted him that much that they brought his entire Development team to MS (not one person was left behind, at his demand. They where quite ...tribal...) This is also part of the reason NT originally worked on DEC systems as well. It's all in a rather fascinating book called Showstopper: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft For a few bucks it really is a most excellent read that goes into some techy and really fascinating issues they encountered. One of the biggest was Memory was so little back then.
- wongarsu 4y ago
  I quite like the NT kernel from a design standpoint. Sadly some of the cooler features were removed over time, like offering Win32, Posix and OS/2 APIs as equal subsystems for interacting with the kernel (though the capability became useful again with WSL1). The entire user management and rights management story is very well thought out; somewhat complicated but incredibly powerful. And while it's not the fastest kernel out there, it really excels at keeping the system interactive and useful under CPU and memory pressure. If only the userspace was as good as the kernel. A lot of good things were (and still are) obscure because they aren't properly surfaced in the Windows UI.
- shadowofneptune 4y ago
  My favorite details from the book: • It is old enough where it has to explain email to the reader, and explain why Gates would be obsessively looking at it throughout the day. • The project got slowed down by adopting a cool but unproven new language called C++. The 'rewrite it in Rust' of its time.
hulitu 4y ago
There is a certain elegance in the OSs of the 1990-2000. NT was a bit slow but predictible. It got slower as you loaded it. Now, with preemptive multitasking some things are very fast and some are very slow. Why do i have to wait seconds for the cursor to blink ? Why it doesn't blink at a constant rate?
s1mon 4y ago
I used it to run Pro/Engineer (now called Creo) in the mid-90s. Prior to that, it only ran on Unix workstations from Sun, SGI, etc. I also had Macs for personal stuff at the time. I remember NT being remarkably stable in comparison to regular Windows, and MacOS of the time. It would run for weeks and weeks without crashing or rebooting. It wasn't sexy, but it worked.

GrumpyYoungMan 4y ago

Depends on what you mean by "good OS". Architecturally, it was a descendant of VMS and its kernel was considered well engineered for its time. It had a ton of bugs and security issues but so did all the pre-2.0 Linux kernels/distributions that were its contemporary. From the userland and UI perspective, well, it's just Windows, both in the positive and negative sense; NT is the granddady of Windows XP and Windows 7 both of which were well regarded but NT also suffered from all the warts and ugliness caused by being converted into a consumer OS.

GauntletWizard 4y ago

NT5/Windows 2000 was a huge leap forward for Microsoft in terms of design model and security. NT5.1/Windows XP had some iterative improvements and some things going backwards. NT4 was better than 95 in every way, but was merely mediocre. Microsoft's suite of workplace tools that ran on NT4 were janky and broken, requiring their own college degree to set up and administer, but they also represented a real productivity boost for many teams.

ethbr0 4y ago

It's the best thing Microsoft ever did... compared to the other things Microsoft did at the time. Microsoft has always had a shit ton of extremely smart people, mired in two shit tons of middling execs. Windows NT was what happened when the product / political side of the company ignored the technologists for a bit.

jedberg 4y ago

I liked windows NT so much I traveled an hour on public transit to stand in a two hour line to get a beta copy of Windows NT 4, and ran it as my daily driver (upgrading to non-beta) until I just switched to Linux (and then the first version of MacOS X). This was after I tried to take the NT 3.51 kernel and marry it with the Win95 UI (that didn't work).

anyfoo 4y ago
> This was after I tried to take the NT 3.51 kernel and marry it with the Win95 UI (that didn't work). How in C:\>'s name would that have been possible? Windows 95 was an unholy mixture of 16bit code running in vm86 mode interleaved with 32bit code, and nearly full Windows 3.1 compatibility even in lower level aspects. NT was a relatively clean full 32bit reimplementation. Was the UI part so cleanly separated to have a chance at that? (Not what my impression was, but I really never dived that deep into Windows.)
- jedberg 4y ago
  It couldn’t. :) I was dumb and naive and just tried to replace the kernel on win95 with the WinNT kernel. Like just the one sys file. After booting it just sat there like “what in C:\>’s name have you done to me?!”
  - anyfoo 4y ago
    > I was dumb and naive and just tried to replace the kernel on win95 with the WinNT kernel. Hahah, I'd be lying if I said that I didn't do equally naive stuff back in the day, I know exactly what your kind of thinking was. It's almost sad, because understanding takes the magic away. I sort of miss looking at computers with the eyes of a child and wondering what lies behind the abstractions...
    - jedberg 4y ago
      I have an even better dumb story. Right after high school I visited my friend at Berkeley, and while there I wrote down his IP address. When I got home I changed my IP to be a different one on the same subnet and matched the gateway address. I knew what a subnet was, I knew what a router was, but I didn’t realize you can’t just reach any router you want. I figured if I did that I could get all the stuff that was restricted to the Berkeley network. Needless to say it didn’t work.
      - ianmcgowan 4y ago

actionfromafar 4y ago

NT 3.x did not have the video driver in kernel, so it was extremely stable. I liked it a lot at school, felt silky smooth on the 486DX66 in the lab.

Goleniewski 4y ago

It was light and day. It is what it is because of the man in charge. Billy G knew that even he didn't have the skills to manage the development of NT. Therefore he got a guy called Dave Cutler to head it up. Dave was the man because he used to work for DEC on a project called Onyx and prism (A hardware/software combo to do essentially what NT does) was cancelled by DEC at the last minute. MS wanted him that much that they brought his entire Development team to MS (not one person was left behind, at his demand. They where quite ...tribal...) This is also part of the reason NT originally worked on DEC systems as well. It's all in a rather fascinating book called Showstopper: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft For a few bucks it really is a most excellent read that goes into some techy and really fascinating issues they encountered. One of the biggest was Memory was so little back then.

wongarsu 4y ago
I quite like the NT kernel from a design standpoint. Sadly some of the cooler features were removed over time, like offering Win32, Posix and OS/2 APIs as equal subsystems for interacting with the kernel (though the capability became useful again with WSL1). The entire user management and rights management story is very well thought out; somewhat complicated but incredibly powerful. And while it's not the fastest kernel out there, it really excels at keeping the system interactive and useful under CPU and memory pressure. If only the userspace was as good as the kernel. A lot of good things were (and still are) obscure because they aren't properly surfaced in the Windows UI.
shadowofneptune 4y ago
My favorite details from the book: • It is old enough where it has to explain email to the reader, and explain why Gates would be obsessively looking at it throughout the day. • The project got slowed down by adopting a cool but unproven new language called C++. The 'rewrite it in Rust' of its time.

hulitu 4y ago

There is a certain elegance in the OSs of the 1990-2000. NT was a bit slow but predictible. It got slower as you loaded it. Now, with preemptive multitasking some things are very fast and some are very slow. Why do i have to wait seconds for the cursor to blink ? Why it doesn't blink at a constant rate?

s1mon 4y ago

I used it to run Pro/Engineer (now called Creo) in the mid-90s. Prior to that, it only ran on Unix workstations from Sun, SGI, etc. I also had Macs for personal stuff at the time. I remember NT being remarkably stable in comparison to regular Windows, and MacOS of the time. It would run for weeks and weeks without crashing or rebooting. It wasn't sexy, but it worked.