14 ms·

Windows NT: Peeking into the Cradle

102 points by jmmv 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
aap_ 3y ago
Recently a build from april 1991 showed up: https://betawiki.net/wiki/Windows_NT_3.1_April_1991_build https://betawiki.net/wiki/Windows_NT_3.1_April_1991_build
causality0 3y ago
There's an almost mystical air about the era of Windows when Microsoft was focused on world domination through offering a genuinely better product. I still remember sitting on my bed totally transfixed during the install when I moved from 95 to 98.
- dale_glass 3y ago
  That's interesting, I didn't like 95 much, and 98 didn't particularly impress me either. Both would blue screen a lot. Back then I was more impressed by NT and OS/2. Windows 2000 is the one I remember most fondly.
  - golergka 3y ago
    Depends on what you had to compare it with. For me, the base of comparison was Win 3.11 and DOS, and Windows 95 blew my mind.
  - stg22 3y ago
    OS/2 would have beaten NT in the consumer and SMB markets. 95 dealt with every weakness of NT in those markets and provided developers, consumers and SMBs with a smooth migration path towards it. It had very good backwards (DOS and 3.11) and forwards (XP) compatibility, reasonable hardware requirements and the ability to boot into DOS (important for gaming and some other applications at the time). It also offered massive advances over 3.11 (proper multi-tasking, the best looking GUI of the time and greatly improved stability) that when combined with the above, pushed user adoption. Given its design requirements, 95 could never have been as stable as NT, but it was a spectacularly successful interim solution for customers not yet ready for the trade-offs that would have involved.
    - avidphantasm 3y ago
      And I believe Windows NT 4 (which had the Windows 95 UI) was the most stable version of NT for a while, even after Windows 2000 came out. Windows 2000 put the video driver in kernel space, which was faster than NT 4, but the early drivers were not great. —-EDIT: I misremembered. It was NT 3.51 that still had the video driver in userspace, NT 4 moved it into the kernel: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT_4.0 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT_4.0
- mschaef 3y ago
  > I still remember sitting on my bed totally transfixed during the install when I moved from 95 to 98. For me, the key Windows 95 moment happened while I was sitting in an IBM lab working as a tester for OS/2 Lan Server. We had a copy of Windows 95 we were testing for compatibility. Playing around one afternoon, we decided to try to break it. We started Drivespace compression, let it run for a while, and pulled the plug on the machine. Plugged it back in and it picked up right where it had left off...
  - Unfrozen0688 3y ago
    And Windows 95 is DOS too, not NT. So less stable than NT
    - mschaef 3y ago
      Agreed, although the relationship of DOS and Windows 95 is significantly stranger than that wording implies. DOS boots Windows 95, and legacy I/O can go through DOS, but DOS is also hosted by V86 machines to run DOS apps. I'm pretty sure it's possible for a DOS process running in a window to issue a file system request (a DOS API call) that gets trapped and processed by 32-bit VMM code and then immediately forwarded back to (a different instance of) DOS for handling by a legacy device driver. There are reasons for this. It's amazing it worked. I'm thankful it's gone.
    - HeckFeck 3y ago
      Not quite. DOS was just the bootloader for Windows 9x. While Windows 95's kernel didn't have the full feature set of NT, it still was more sophisticated than DOS. Source: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/?p=24063 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/?p=24063
evntdrvn 3y ago
icymi, Dave Cutler's got a great YouTube channel! https://www.youtube.com/@DavesGarage https://www.youtube.com/@DavesGarage
- drewg123 3y ago
  That's not his channel, its a different Dave. However, there is an excellent 3 hour long interview with Dave Cutler on that channel. https://youtu.be/xi1Lq79mLeE https://youtu.be/xi1Lq79mLeE
  - evntdrvn 3y ago
    ah oops thanks!!
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- eddythompson80 3y ago
  That's not Dave Cutler. That is David Plummer. He interviewed Cutler. Plummer is retired, Cutler is still full time employee at Microsoft.
mise_en_place 3y ago
> From reading the book, I learned that Cutler had the same mentality for his OS and, in fact, the system wasn’t ported to x86 until late in its development. The reason for this is that the RISC architectures at the time (MIPS, Alpha AXP, PPC) had weird ISAs. There are things like branch delay slots and MIPS in particular required aligning to a 32-bit boundary (x86 does not). Dave Plummer has a YT channel and I highly recommend his interview with both Dave Cutler and Raymond Chen. It was a lot of work to port to these other architectures, and they didn't have source control at the time, so they were hand merging these changes.
- runjake 3y ago
  Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxmZPMg7vIs&list=PLF2KJ6Gy3cZ6XYnS6VZm-NLBEMfp997dH https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxmZPMg7vIs&list=PLF2KJ6Gy3c... And if you're interested in that, you'll likely be interested in his Raymond Chen interview as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTPTPJEVYlY&list=PLF2KJ6Gy3cZ7kZk0Zr0OqbvZHwxfPUCYB https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTPTPJEVYlY&list=PLF2KJ6Gy3c...
Unfrozen0688 3y ago
NT really has stood the test of time. Still runs on Windows 11. I am weary about the future though.
- 6th 3y ago
  honestly: why bother at this point? It's their product. They didn't have to make it trash but they've not just let it, they made it by design this way. Why eat trash?
  - Unfrozen0688 3y ago
    Gaming - Yes Linux and Proton and all, but it just won't be as good I know it. All new and old games are basically guaranteed to run best on Windows due to the massive userbase, what other choice do devs have? Work - I work on Windows clients and Windows Server, so I need to know my way around the OS. The tooling with Powershell is nice now, too. The workflow with window snapping is actually also excellent. Entertainment - All "official" streaming Netflix stuff runs at 4k and I can also run VPN and torrent just fine on Windows. Stability - I run an old rig on Windows 10 privately and a work Win11 laptop. Nowadays, you only need to reboot Windows once a month for updates. And all the good apps runs like Firefox, Ocular, sumatraPDF etc...
    - 6th 3y ago
      I'm not actually out to convince you to change, just sayin' - it's not the only dog on show and I'm doing fine without. Nobody will force you but I felt MS certainly pushed me away hard. At home I don't get reboots when I don't want to. At work Windows did that to the workstation at work here last weekend - really infuriating that one. There's too much to list re: 20 years of windows decline. There's some good no doubt, I'm expect the kernel has been getting gradual if not huge improvements. It's just the rest of the company is not run like the core engineers would be required to. All the other shit hanging of it is overwhelmingly bad. It's too much, too user hostile, too dark patterned. How they messed up the near perfect Win2k gui to this... yuck. It's all just too much, for me at least. So I left it on a dedicated disk but is practically never booted anymore. Maybe once a year. If that. I've been many years gaming, developing, doing my tax, spreadsheets, watching media, web surfing - it's all much the same. I use firefox at work or home. It feels the same at work on windows as it does on home. I have no need.
tambourine_man 3y ago
>These days we take x86-based personal computers as the one and only possibility The author must not like Macs :)
Springtime 3y ago
Easy to read article, in part thanks to the choice of mid-tone blue background and pleasant serif typeface. Kind of refreshing when one is used to just white/dark themes. One typo that could be fixed: > a couple paragraphs are completely unreadable due to broken grammar, punctuation, and capitaliazation [sic]
ThinkBeat 3y ago
FreeBSB and its cousins were not started from scratch but descended from a stable UNIX. Microsoft was really trying hard to win a huge contact with DOD (If memory serves). They worked along with DEC for the contract and planned to sell computers based on DEC Alpha + WindowsNT. The POSIX compatibility subsystem was added specifically because the DOD contact demanded such a feature. Sadly (for them) they did not win the contract. The DOD was not the reason Microsoft developed Windows but some of the features and archtetures were in respons to features demanded.
Triangle9349 3y ago
I remember when the source code leaked for Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 online in 2020. It was a lot of fun to dig around.
jmmv 3y ago
Original author here. Back in September, I got the recommendation to read the "Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft" book from some other comment thread here in HN. I don't exactly remember which thread that was though... but learning about the history of Windows NT sounded interesting, so I bought the book right away and have been slowly reading through it over the last three months. The story in the book seemed so exciting (and messed up) that I ended up writing a "book review" with commentary on various topics that caught my attention. The details might not be super-precise, but they are hopefully enough to paint the right picture in its context. I thought you might enjoy it due to where I got the suggestion from!
- HankB99 3y ago
  Is the book labelled as fiction? I understand that early versions of NT emitted error messages identifying itself as OS/2. Did the book explain when NT became "brand new OS from scratch". I think there's been a bit of revisionist history WRT the roots of NT. MS wants to make it something "we did without their help." I didn't read your entire blog so apologies if you addressed this.
  - jmmv 3y ago
    My understanding is that the original collaboration between Microsoft and IBM was around certain parts of OS/2, not the whole system, so it is plausible that Microsoft worked simultaneously on OS/2 and NT as the book describes. Note that NT is heavily based on the work previously done at Digital on VMS (by people from the same team), so there are some pre-existing foundations there, at least in terms of design principles and ideas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2 provides a recap of the history but I cannot find details on exactly who did what in that page. And my memory from what I read in the book is fuzzy at this point...
  - dboreham 3y ago
    It's been a few decades since I read the book, but note it was published just after NT was released, when everyone knew that it had been called OS/2-NT for a while. So probably no wool pulling going on there. Note also that this was a naming move. NT was never based on OS/2. otoh in my experience (I've worked for two companies that had books written about them), book authors tend to a) focus on drama and b) get their information from a small number of senior participants.

102 points by jmmv 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

aap_ 3y ago

Recently a build from april 1991 showed up: https://betawiki.net/wiki/Windows_NT_3.1_April_1991_build https://betawiki.net/wiki/Windows_NT_3.1_April_1991_build

causality0 3y ago

There's an almost mystical air about the era of Windows when Microsoft was focused on world domination through offering a genuinely better product. I still remember sitting on my bed totally transfixed during the install when I moved from 95 to 98.

dale_glass 3y ago
That's interesting, I didn't like 95 much, and 98 didn't particularly impress me either. Both would blue screen a lot. Back then I was more impressed by NT and OS/2. Windows 2000 is the one I remember most fondly.
- golergka 3y ago
  Depends on what you had to compare it with. For me, the base of comparison was Win 3.11 and DOS, and Windows 95 blew my mind.
- stg22 3y ago
  OS/2 would have beaten NT in the consumer and SMB markets. 95 dealt with every weakness of NT in those markets and provided developers, consumers and SMBs with a smooth migration path towards it. It had very good backwards (DOS and 3.11) and forwards (XP) compatibility, reasonable hardware requirements and the ability to boot into DOS (important for gaming and some other applications at the time). It also offered massive advances over 3.11 (proper multi-tasking, the best looking GUI of the time and greatly improved stability) that when combined with the above, pushed user adoption. Given its design requirements, 95 could never have been as stable as NT, but it was a spectacularly successful interim solution for customers not yet ready for the trade-offs that would have involved.
  - avidphantasm 3y ago
    And I believe Windows NT 4 (which had the Windows 95 UI) was the most stable version of NT for a while, even after Windows 2000 came out. Windows 2000 put the video driver in kernel space, which was faster than NT 4, but the early drivers were not great. —-EDIT: I misremembered. It was NT 3.51 that still had the video driver in userspace, NT 4 moved it into the kernel: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT_4.0 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT_4.0
mschaef 3y ago
> I still remember sitting on my bed totally transfixed during the install when I moved from 95 to 98. For me, the key Windows 95 moment happened while I was sitting in an IBM lab working as a tester for OS/2 Lan Server. We had a copy of Windows 95 we were testing for compatibility. Playing around one afternoon, we decided to try to break it. We started Drivespace compression, let it run for a while, and pulled the plug on the machine. Plugged it back in and it picked up right where it had left off...
- Unfrozen0688 3y ago
  And Windows 95 is DOS too, not NT. So less stable than NT
  - mschaef 3y ago
    Agreed, although the relationship of DOS and Windows 95 is significantly stranger than that wording implies. DOS boots Windows 95, and legacy I/O can go through DOS, but DOS is also hosted by V86 machines to run DOS apps. I'm pretty sure it's possible for a DOS process running in a window to issue a file system request (a DOS API call) that gets trapped and processed by 32-bit VMM code and then immediately forwarded back to (a different instance of) DOS for handling by a legacy device driver. There are reasons for this. It's amazing it worked. I'm thankful it's gone.
  - HeckFeck 3y ago
    Not quite. DOS was just the bootloader for Windows 9x. While Windows 95's kernel didn't have the full feature set of NT, it still was more sophisticated than DOS. Source: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/?p=24063 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/?p=24063

evntdrvn 3y ago

icymi, Dave Cutler's got a great YouTube channel! https://www.youtube.com/@DavesGarage https://www.youtube.com/@DavesGarage

drewg123 3y ago
That's not his channel, its a different Dave. However, there is an excellent 3 hour long interview with Dave Cutler on that channel. https://youtu.be/xi1Lq79mLeE https://youtu.be/xi1Lq79mLeE
- evntdrvn 3y ago
  ah oops thanks!!
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
eddythompson80 3y ago
That's not Dave Cutler. That is David Plummer. He interviewed Cutler. Plummer is retired, Cutler is still full time employee at Microsoft.

mise_en_place 3y ago

> From reading the book, I learned that Cutler had the same mentality for his OS and, in fact, the system wasn’t ported to x86 until late in its development. The reason for this is that the RISC architectures at the time (MIPS, Alpha AXP, PPC) had weird ISAs. There are things like branch delay slots and MIPS in particular required aligning to a 32-bit boundary (x86 does not). Dave Plummer has a YT channel and I highly recommend his interview with both Dave Cutler and Raymond Chen. It was a lot of work to port to these other architectures, and they didn't have source control at the time, so they were hand merging these changes.

runjake 3y ago
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxmZPMg7vIs&list=PLF2KJ6Gy3cZ6XYnS6VZm-NLBEMfp997dH https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxmZPMg7vIs&list=PLF2KJ6Gy3c... And if you're interested in that, you'll likely be interested in his Raymond Chen interview as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTPTPJEVYlY&list=PLF2KJ6Gy3cZ7kZk0Zr0OqbvZHwxfPUCYB https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTPTPJEVYlY&list=PLF2KJ6Gy3c...

Unfrozen0688 3y ago

NT really has stood the test of time. Still runs on Windows 11. I am weary about the future though.

6th 3y ago
honestly: why bother at this point? It's their product. They didn't have to make it trash but they've not just let it, they made it by design this way. Why eat trash?
- Unfrozen0688 3y ago
  Gaming - Yes Linux and Proton and all, but it just won't be as good I know it. All new and old games are basically guaranteed to run best on Windows due to the massive userbase, what other choice do devs have? Work - I work on Windows clients and Windows Server, so I need to know my way around the OS. The tooling with Powershell is nice now, too. The workflow with window snapping is actually also excellent. Entertainment - All "official" streaming Netflix stuff runs at 4k and I can also run VPN and torrent just fine on Windows. Stability - I run an old rig on Windows 10 privately and a work Win11 laptop. Nowadays, you only need to reboot Windows once a month for updates. And all the good apps runs like Firefox, Ocular, sumatraPDF etc...
  - 6th 3y ago
    I'm not actually out to convince you to change, just sayin' - it's not the only dog on show and I'm doing fine without. Nobody will force you but I felt MS certainly pushed me away hard. At home I don't get reboots when I don't want to. At work Windows did that to the workstation at work here last weekend - really infuriating that one. There's too much to list re: 20 years of windows decline. There's some good no doubt, I'm expect the kernel has been getting gradual if not huge improvements. It's just the rest of the company is not run like the core engineers would be required to. All the other shit hanging of it is overwhelmingly bad. It's too much, too user hostile, too dark patterned. How they messed up the near perfect Win2k gui to this... yuck. It's all just too much, for me at least. So I left it on a dedicated disk but is practically never booted anymore. Maybe once a year. If that. I've been many years gaming, developing, doing my tax, spreadsheets, watching media, web surfing - it's all much the same. I use firefox at work or home. It feels the same at work on windows as it does on home. I have no need.

tambourine_man 3y ago

>These days we take x86-based personal computers as the one and only possibility The author must not like Macs :)

Springtime 3y ago

Easy to read article, in part thanks to the choice of mid-tone blue background and pleasant serif typeface. Kind of refreshing when one is used to just white/dark themes. One typo that could be fixed: > a couple paragraphs are completely unreadable due to broken grammar, punctuation, and capitaliazation [sic]

ThinkBeat 3y ago

FreeBSB and its cousins were not started from scratch but descended from a stable UNIX. Microsoft was really trying hard to win a huge contact with DOD (If memory serves). They worked along with DEC for the contract and planned to sell computers based on DEC Alpha + WindowsNT. The POSIX compatibility subsystem was added specifically because the DOD contact demanded such a feature. Sadly (for them) they did not win the contract. The DOD was not the reason Microsoft developed Windows but some of the features and archtetures were in respons to features demanded.

Triangle9349 3y ago

I remember when the source code leaked for Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 online in 2020. It was a lot of fun to dig around.

jmmv 3y ago

Original author here. Back in September, I got the recommendation to read the "Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft" book from some other comment thread here in HN. I don't exactly remember which thread that was though... but learning about the history of Windows NT sounded interesting, so I bought the book right away and have been slowly reading through it over the last three months. The story in the book seemed so exciting (and messed up) that I ended up writing a "book review" with commentary on various topics that caught my attention. The details might not be super-precise, but they are hopefully enough to paint the right picture in its context. I thought you might enjoy it due to where I got the suggestion from!

HankB99 3y ago
Is the book labelled as fiction? I understand that early versions of NT emitted error messages identifying itself as OS/2. Did the book explain when NT became "brand new OS from scratch". I think there's been a bit of revisionist history WRT the roots of NT. MS wants to make it something "we did without their help." I didn't read your entire blog so apologies if you addressed this.
- jmmv 3y ago
  My understanding is that the original collaboration between Microsoft and IBM was around certain parts of OS/2, not the whole system, so it is plausible that Microsoft worked simultaneously on OS/2 and NT as the book describes. Note that NT is heavily based on the work previously done at Digital on VMS (by people from the same team), so there are some pre-existing foundations there, at least in terms of design principles and ideas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2 provides a recap of the history but I cannot find details on exactly who did what in that page. And my memory from what I read in the book is fuzzy at this point...
- dboreham 3y ago
  It's been a few decades since I read the book, but note it was published just after NT was released, when everyone knew that it had been called OS/2-NT for a while. So probably no wool pulling going on there. Note also that this was a naming move. NT was never based on OS/2. otoh in my experience (I've worked for two companies that had books written about them), book authors tend to a) focus on drama and b) get their information from a small number of senior participants.