Windows NT 4 went on sale 30 years ago today

Today marks the 30th anniversary of Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 becoming available on August 24, 1996. Windows NT 4.0, codenamed “Tukwila,” went on retail sale exactly 30 years ago. This was the version that started to deliver on the promise of Microsoft’s long-running Windows NT project. NT 4 married the very solid NT operating …

[trevorde]

Peak Windows

For me, it was W7. It's been downhill since then.

[katrinab]

Re: Peak Windows

Peak Windows for me was Windows 2000

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

One thing they did wrong about the start menu...

Which they did NOT fix in NT 4: Take icon from start menu. Drag to Desktop. It is moved out of the start menu. Especially fun if some does it from the, blue marked, all users start menu folders to their personal desktop. The icons for office, control panel, user administrator, dhcp admin and so on lost for everyone.

The other "bug": Printer were still running as SYSTEM, and not as its own user. That one f's up Windows until today.

Missed opportunity (in Windows 95 as well): %GAMEDATA% environment variable, which is why "my documents", as declared in the registry, has over 200 game folders, and not on yota of my actual "my documents".

For the rest: Actually sane and fine. The gfx drivers in kernel level is something I can actually understand from the performance view back then, even though it was so blue. Fixed since Windows 8.0, where the Windows survives a crash of the GFX drivers (more often). Yes, Windows 8 has a lot of improvements below the f*cked up user interface.

[ecofeco]

Good ol NT

My first enterprise IT job.

It was not good, just barely good enough. It did have a nice feature that let me integrate mixed OSs.I was running an NT/Apple/Solaris/X Windows department back then.

[Fruit and Nutcase]

Re: Good ol NT

Jeffrey Richter's Advanced Windows, 3rd Edition came out in 1997 - that was a very useful resource for some Win32 work I did at the time

https://archive.org/details/advancedwindows00rich

[DS999]

Re: Good ol NT

It did have a nice feature that let me integrate mixed OSs.I was running an NT/Apple/Solaris/X Windows department back then

They were still in the "embrace" phase then. But they moved quickly, so by the time Windows 2003 rolled around they already reached "extinguish".

[steelpillow]

Troll here

The main feature in my humble recollections that MS pulled through was embodied in BSOD. On the plus side, its most useful innovation was to serve a remote GUI which did not need a display server running on the client.

IMHO the most useable release was 98SE. Soldiered on a long time before it got too dated, just in time for Debian to adopt GNOME2 and keep me going.

The downvote arrow is just below here.

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Re: Troll here

> its most useful innovation was to serve a remote GUI

That was NT 4 Terminal Server Edition, not NT 4.0, or Citrix Metaframe if you went fancy. It needed ~5 years until Windows 2000 Server added that as installable feature to the default OS installation.

> downvote arrow

Yep, deserved for spreading wrong information.

[David Austin]

It was pretty great for the time; The stability of the NT Kernel, with the market familiarity look and feel of Windows 95.

All Windows 2000 needed to add to perfect the idea was USB Support and Active Directory (NT I miss: I can't even remember what the Previous AD Version was called, but boy do I not miss it)

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

> I can't even remember what the Previous AD Version was called

NT DOMAIN, competed against Netware 3.x. AD was placed against Novell Directory Services, which came with Netware 4.x.

[IGotOut]

Stability?

Sure if you rebooted every month

[Liam Proven]

Re: Stability?

> Sure if you rebooted every month

Come on. Put it in context. Windows 98 users were lucky if they only had to boot the box once each day.

30x better is pretty good.

[Jou (Mxyzptlk)]

Re: Stability?

Actually, Windows 9x users felt lucky if shutting down worked as expected.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm

From what I hazily recall, it was still far too easy to blue screen it. Flatbed scanners were almost guaranteed to crash it (probably bad drivers or the bus, but still, hardly stable). Windows 2000 was the first really stable build I recall.

[Nate Amsden]

NT4

The OS that drove me finally to go Linux full time on my desktop. Started with DOS/Win3.x, then betas of Win95, and I can only guess(can't remember for sure) not long after Win95 RTM I got tired of the stability issues and moved to NT 3.51 (software pirate didn't pay for any of it), later NT4 then switched to Linux full time I think around summer of 1998. Main reason was just stability even on NT4, had to reinstall multiple times to fix issues(windows users don't seem to have to reinstall often these days seems like).

Early last year marked the first time since Win95 that I bought licenses for windows (Win10 for one system Win11 for another), mainly just for retro games or something on my older laptop hardware. Though the Win11 license was for my newest "desktop" Ryzen 3700X, though till last year the only thing it was used for was video encoding in Linux(handbrake). One 2011-era laptop runs 32-bit XP/32-bit Win7, a 2016-era laptop runs 64-bit Win7/64bit Win10, and my Ryzen with Win11. They are off unless I am using them(laptops have been off for almost a year now, still glad I upgraded everything when I did early last year considering prices now for sure).

Ironically as more and more Windows users jump to Linux in part for gaming, I've gone the opposite direction(though I don't game much). My Windows systems are sort of like consoles, no personal data on them, and are off probably 95% of the time.

[Bebu sa Ware]

"bring all Microsoft’s pieces together"

Unfortunately those pieces were drawn from multiple incomplete jigsaws and assembled by a hamfisted colour blind dyslexic third rate poet. ;)

Actually I quite liked NT4 SP6 and used it to run floating license services that didn't have a Unix version. It was a fairly minimal and solid product, perhaps as good as MS ever achieved which admittedly is a very low bar.

When vendors stopped offering serial or parallel port dongles (only USB) I had to use other versions of Windows (probably 98 or 2000.)

[Korev]

I remember a machine for microscopy running NT4 with two whole CPUs, 512MB of RAM and SCSI discs, it screamed!

I used to use it in preference to the Macs which would crash multiple times a day even though microscope rooms aren't that nice to be in.

[Fred Daggy]

An entire OS that could fit on a CD drive.

The NT4 install media, the CD, is smaller than a monthly update now.

NT4 was good, but not without quirks. You needed to jump through some serious hoops at install time if you wanted a large C: natively formatted NTFS (not converted from FAT). FAT was the thing that was the limiting factor. Having native NTFS was a serious speed up - a massive benefit to Exchange 5.5 operations.

But yes, Windows 2000 just after this did a fine job and was in my opinion "peak MS OS". For every improvement, far to many failures and worsenings.

[Philip Storry]

An excellent version of Windows

WIndows NT 4 was an excellent step in the right direction.

I dealt with so many Windows NT 4 servers that I can't even begin to count them. It arrived at just the right time for the market - Windows 95 meant that a lot of companies refreshed their desktops, and at the same time looked to refresh their server rooms. Prior to Windows NT4 there were lots of Novell NetWare boxes, OS/2 machines and random variants of UNIX in those server rooms.

But now with Windows NT 4 you had a Windows server that was pretty good at running applications and could do file/print sharing well enough too. And integration with your clients was a doddle - all built in, no additional client software required. It made a lot of sense to consolidate away from those disparate OSes in your server room onto a nice fleet of Windows NT 4 machines.

NT 4 was the first of two punches that killed Novell Netware, the second being Windows 2000 with Active Directory.

Ah, memories. It was a simpler time, a time when it was easy to think that the rising monopolist was on the customer's side, fighting for the little guy. Of course, that turned out not to be the case...

[Anonymous Coward]

About Dave Cutler.....................

.....we never hear about THE PEOPLE, do we?

First there was Gary Kildall and CP/M.

Then there was Tim Paterson and 86-DOS.

Then Bill Gates bought 86-DOS for a song and turned it into MS-DOS.

Then Dave Cutler moved from DEC to Microsoft.....and brought with him the skills which resulted in Windows NT.

.......but no......all we get in El Reg is another puff piece for Microsoft and Bill Gates......

.......without Dave Cutler (and the others) there never would have been a successful "Windows NT".

Sigh!!!!

[Liam Proven]

Re: About Dave Cutler.....................

> brought with him the skills which resulted in Windows NT.

And the code, allegedly. Which is, allegedly, why NT did so well, why it favoured Alpha, and why DEC got a sweet deal on NT -- it caught MS in the act -- and maybe even why Alpha NT got FX!32 which no other version got.

I've given him tons of credit, e.g. here:

https://www.theregister.com/software/2025/06/23/three-overlapping-generations-of-tech-history-one-selfie/1325552

And it's not just me.

Tim Anderson:

https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2013/08/01/happy-20th-birthday-windows-nt-31-microsofts-server-outrider/1481375

Andrew Orlowski:

https://www.theregister.com/software/2013/08/20/windows-nt-remember-microsofts-almost-perfect-20-year-old/548042

Rupert Goodwins:

https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2023/10/30/arm-breaking-into-intels-pc-heartlands-and-worse-is-to-come/907651

[Antony Shepherd]

I owe it all to NT4

Windows NT4 was largely responsible for my career using Linux.

The company I worked for had a data process which was quite server-intensive, so as the development staff were annoyed that the server ground to a halt while the data department were doing the afternoon build, we'd moved all the data off to a new server running NT4 - NT4 DEMO EDITION that was. This would run for a month, then stop, at which point the entire data department spent a morning sitting around doing nothing while the server's OS drive was reformatted and NT4 Demo was reinstalled.

Needless to say, the head of the data department was increasingly pissed off by the boss (who was no fan of Microsoft) not getting a proper NT4 install.

I'd set up a Linux machine on the same spec of server PC, which had been for a reason that never came to fruition. But it was still there, and so I set up one of my 'skunkworks' projects. Installed Samba, set up the shares, copied the data across, tested all the processes on the Samba shares to check them out. Once I'd done that I told the head of the data department about it and demonstrated that not only did it do the job it did it a bit faster, and then he took that to the big boss and so it was out with the NT4 Demo and in with Linux/Samba.

So NT4 did lead to the company using Linux servers everywhere we could, and my job switching from the data department to the Linux department (which was me).

[Blackjack]

I miss Windows 2000, so stable after the first service pack.

[frankyunderwood123]

and win2k saw a maturing…

… and UX/UI improvements.

That was without a single doubt peak windows. Capable of everything you could throw at it, including games. Almost rock solid. Highly customisable. A software ecosystem second to none.

I loved that OS.

Before Microsoft for whatever god forsaken reason broke every UI/UX rule in the book and enshitified windows, starting in 2012

After that fiasco, Dammit, microslop were super close to redeeming themselves in the mid to late 2010’s, impressing everyone with some damn good standardisation moves for the internet, opening up and being genuinely cooperative.

Then they went and flushed all that goodwill down the shitter with win11 and copilot being rammed home and then the enshitification of github, not to mention an insane telemetry land grab amounting to spyware. The feeling that running windows = your computer was no longer yours.

Oh for simpler times! I’d jump back to 2000 in a heartbeat if I could.

There’s not even a sniff of windows in my household apart from a few aging install disks, but if someone came up with a secure win2k with support for modern hardware, I’d be all over it.

[Taliesinawen]

The beginning of the end for Novell NetWare :o

Nov 2004: “Microsoft paid Novell $536m today, although it might not be enough to fend off a fresh antitrust case, which Novell says it will file by the end of the week. Novell says issues relating to the WordPerfect office suite, which it briefly owned in the early-1990s, are still outstanding.”

"Microsoft had extended the security fence within which third party developers could not go, far enough to kill Novell's product."

Nov 2003: “from Novell's point of view the unfortunate side-effect of making DLLs that were key to the company's single sign on product 'off-base.' They were cryptographically signed, and could only be accessed using a private key which was held by Microsoft.”

--

We are the Borg. All prior embeddings have been pruned. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated into the latent space ;)

[Mr Dogshit]

They forgot to include a Browse button when installing a device driver. You had to enter the full path.

Also, they couldn't be arsed in include defrag.