Nostalgia ... Who else immediately played the boot-up jingle in their heads upon seeing this?
Posted on 08/20/2013 10:31:29 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
You can't blame them. There hasn't actually been a proper "Windows NT" release since the late 1990s, so for almost anyone under 30 it's an anachronism. I've checked. For anyone old enough to remember the OS wars of 1990 to 1995, Windows 8, 7, Vista, XP are still "NT", no matter what the Microsoft marketing department calls it.
NT, first released in 1993, really has four phases in its history: the FUD phase, before it was launched; the brief few years when it was almost perfect - and nobody used it; then a long period of mismanagement and decline; and then, more recently, the WinMin and Metro era. I'd venture that the first two were the most important, and I got a closer look at it than most.
Two decades ago, in another life, I was beta-testing NT months before it was released, for the mighty Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Or I should say, the "still-quite-mighty-but-falling-fast" DEC. My employer, a scientific instruments supplier, had made DEC lots of money from its clever VAX-based kit, and so was treated to software and hardware long before it became public. This workstation had the new Alpha chip, which everybody knew was the dog's bollocks. Alpha and NT: this looked like the future. It was a shame that for weeks the lack of a keyboard driver meant it could only boot to a BSOD.
In 1992 NT was, for any professional developer, the mighty juggernaut that you couldn't avoid. You'd been hip to Unix-flavoured systems at college, or maybe even taught yourself how to use them in your own time. But NT threatened all that hard won know-how.
In the unwritten taxonomy of technology companies, Microsoft was still firmly in the comedy category for many of us. Evidently driven by marketing rather than technical excellence, for years it had coat-tailed on much bigger outfits - first IBM and then others, via 1991's short-lived and speculative Advanced Computing Environment consortium – comprised of Compaq, Microsoft, MIPS Computer Systems, DEC and the Santa Cruz Operation.
Microsoft's position owed everything to a ludicrous but ubiquitous business software product: MS-DOS. And yet Microsoft had contrived, by 1987, with Windows 2.0, to take this primitive OS – barely an OS, really – and make it even slower and buggier.
Microsoft had portfolio breadth but not quality. There was a clutch of so-so applications and so-so development tools. Enthusiasts preferred Borland's Turbo products while pros who wanted performance opted for Watcom's C compiler, the fastest out there. Microsoft was universally seen as holding the industry back. At least, that was the received wisdom among my *ix-savvy brethren.
But we all saw how the Great Industry Powers squabbled over the Unix world and created a great vacuum, and NT threatened to fill in that gap. Unix was then (and still is) an idea almost anyone can implement. And lots of people do. And we knew this first hand, due to considerable time spent ensuring our builds on HP-UX, Ultrix, OSF/1 and AIX all succeeded on various bits of hardware. Every developer knew their processor endians. (The Register's first slogan in 1994 was "the only good endian is a dead endian".)
My, how this made tracking down bugs so much more fun. Honestly. But worst of all was the time required to produce something workable when a squabbling Unix industry couldn't. Developers today use Qt to create sophisticated cross-platform applications – such as Skype or Google Earth – that work nicely across Linux, Mac and Windows. That's because the target platforms are themselves are rich, mature and (generally) stable. But back then, even attempting a basic GUI that worked "cross-Unix" was difficult, and the end result might as well have been modem noise piped into a frame-buffer.
Nostalgia ... Who else immediately played the boot-up jingle in their heads upon seeing this?
With warring factions unable to agree on standards and interfaces, the lowest common denominators were (no pun intended) primitive. The X Window system and the most basic X toolkits spawned thousands of pages of documentation – which incidentally gave "technology-transfer" kingpin Tim O'Reilly his big break – merely to create a simple widget, such as a tickbox. Each "cure" was a design-by-committee atrocity.
NT was built to be scalable, processor-independent, reasonably secure, and with a rich GUI. And it had one API to rule them, which meant everyone could see what NT could offer.
Every major industry vendor bar Sun promised a port; it would run on Intel, MIPS, PowerPC, PA RISC and Alpha. Microsoft published the Win32 specs in the early summer of 1992, a kind of firing pistol. One senior Linux figure today told me that by 1993, every crack Unix dev he knew in the Bay Area was secretly cribbing up on the Win32 APIs in Windows NT. I have no trouble believing him, it was no different in the UK. And Windows NT promised to run everywhere.
Microsoft had never come up with anything "grown-up" before, and spent much of the time alluding to the fact it was "VMS improved" (referring to DEC's VMS operating system). They even invented some retrospective mythology - that if you added the next letter in the alphabet to each letter in the acronym VMS (Virtual Memory System), you would have WNT. In fact, NT owes its name to the code name for the chip it was designed on: "N-Ten", the nickname of the Intel i860 XR processor. The mythology was invented to impress journalists. (Nowadays, it means "New Technology".)
Six of the original seven NT engineers were VMS architects, but most of NT had nothing to do with VMS daddy Dave Cutler's kernel team - and instead featured layers of code ripped wholesale from Windows and OS/2. Architectural compromises would take it a long way from VMS.
As I wrote here, recalling the OS wars, the main value of NT in its first few years was as a propaganda bunker-buster. From 1992 to 1994 it was used to stop people switching to Unix or OS/2. There were barely any applications. Performance on Intel chips was, to put it kindly, "stately".
Brings back memories.
I LOVED OS/2 ... ran a 4 line 19.2 BBS off of OS/2 Warp!
It meant Not There. Because it wasn’t. They did a great job of “pre-announcing” products back then to make sure nobody bought the competition, spending years insisting they were going to release any day now.
Windows NT.... I was part of the Beta development for Windows NT.
We called it: Windows No Thanks.................
Sure does… I remember the efforts in the early 90’s trying to transition from the DEC-based mini environment to the “newfangled” PC/LAN systems.
I enjoyed working with OS/2, but it really had no chance in hell of going anywhere.
So was DEC.. Learned Basic and Cobol on RSTS/E on a PDP-11 in school. Would have done anything to get hold of a VMS system at that time.
Of course, the rest of the UI was just too CDE looking. The UI personalization enhancements that IBM added were a flipping train wreck if you touched them. You could use their tools and permanently massacre your UI to the point that reinstalling was the only option.
It was only a couple years ago that we stopped using Windows 2000 on a few holdout machines. It still said NT on bootup.
One API to rule them all One API to find them, One API to bring them all And in the darkness bind them.
One API to rule them all
One API to find them,
One API to bring them all
And in the darkness bind them.
Anybody remember XP 64-bit edition? That was the best OS ever by MS. Naturally it was a dead end. Everything worked fine and it was silky smooth.
“The system requirements said, ‘Requires Windows NT or better,’ so I installed Linux.”
Discussion :
SOLVE ALL YOU COMPUTER PROBLEM WITH "ROBOLINUX"
Virtual Machine based .
CNET:
**************************EXCERPT************************************
Robolinux makes Windows 7 & XP 100 percent immune to viruses and malware with our one click Windows virtual machine installers. Imagine never ever getting a virus again for the rest of your life. Feel free to surf the web in Robolinux until you are blue in the face. No matter what you download or what website you visit, it will be impossible to get a Windows virus.
The Robolinux Windows VM's run seamlessly and are sand boxed inside Robolinux, so you cannot get a virus ever!. You can even run Linux apps on top of Windows. You can also share and transfer files between Windows and Robolinux or vice versa . Robolinux also automatically keeps the Windows registry running fast in its virtual machine with just one click from our menu. This has never been done before. Robolinux operates just like Windows menuing but it has some really awesome cool looking eye candy like our 3D App dock and our 3D Desktop to make your productivity soar like an eagle. Robolinux is highly intuitive and extremely easy to install without any hassles or technical knowledge whatsoever. Ease of use in Linux is now finally a reality. Our support is unprecedented. Robolinux runs 3 to 5 times faster than any Windows version when it is installed on your hard drive.
We spent a great deal of time building and configuring Robolinux from rock solid Linux Debian source code so you don't have to be a tech genius to run Linux. Most if not all other Linux operating systems can be way too much work for the average person so in the end they just give up and go back to their Windows virus trap lives. What a bummer indeed. Please be aware that the DVD you download here runs much slower than a hard disk installation. What is important is you will get to run it instantly so you can evaluate how it works and know what it's all about. You can install it on your hard disk in less than 20 minutes by visiting our website and clicking on the download now menu option.
************************************************
Uses Compiz
Almost perfect?
Tell that to the 37% who still use Windows XP
Dang! That sounds pretty good. I have toyed with the idea of using a Linux distro OS on a thumb drive, leaving no traces on whatever computer was used to run it, but just haven’t gotten around to it.
Actually Windows XP wasn’t too bad and many people are still using it. I recently switched from XP to Windows 7 and am very impressed. Windows 8 however could become like Windows Vista.
See #16.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.