The Computer Chronicles - Windows NT (1993)

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[@ebridgewater]

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.

[@sontodosnarcos]

Yes, it was introduced together with NT to support features like file access permissions, long file names, etc.

[@Lofote]

The reason why it was called "NT file system" is because it was introduced in the times when the product was called NT ;)

[@TheRus13]

In the beginning, there was HPFS support from OS / 2.Then she was expelled.

[@selami32]

NT kernel was lifesaver for Microsoft

[@KrunchyTheClown78]

Yup, without it, they would have been in real trouble after WinME.

[@Dumb_Killjoy]

@@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

[@askhowiknow5527]

selami32 They just repackaged much of their OS/2 code and screwed IBM though

[@justsomecommentchannel8602]

@@askhowiknow5527 well yeah it was their code

[@valenrn8657]

@@askhowiknow5527 Windows NT kernel is closer to DEC's VMS, not OS/2.

[@OldAussieAds]

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.

[@b1lleman]

Yeah, loved it too. But even better when NT became windows 2000 which -if I remember correctly- supported much more PnP hardware.

[@OldAussieAds]

@@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).

[@kreuner11]

"We're not seriously looking at WIndows NT right now" RIP that business

[@bjpeterdelacruz7091]

They're seriously looking at Microsoft Azure right now.

[@charlesallen4821]

I wonder how long that philosophy lasted.

[@Dan-TechAndMusic]

​@@charlesallen4821 As long as OS/2's feasibility, I'd think... So not all that long.

[@AcornElectron]

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….

[@vocemais721]

Damn, 11 months late to make the joke. I wonder what he felt just 2 years later

[@Diskoboy1974]

To this day, NT 4 is still my all time favorite OS.

[@b1lleman]

Yeah, loved it too. But even better when NT became windows 2000 which if I remember correctly supported much more PnP hardware.

[@thecoolgames2995]

To this day, we use file system from July 1993 NTFS, jubilee 30 years

[@DavidPigbody]

​@hungrydragowindows 11 is based on NT

[@Valet2]

@@Douglas_HamiltonWin95, 98 and Me are NOT based on NT!

[@RGG800]

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

[@lordcron]

I remember when this show was on and I remember all these shows that aired back then. My how far we've come.

[@raven4k998]

windows NT was supposed to look like win 3.1 how scary I'm scared hold me

[@raven4k998]

@@vardekpetrovic9716 no no no nt was just another version of windows 10 silly

[@lawrencebarras1655]

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.

[@BillyBobDingledorf]

Windows NT was more of a POC. Windows 2000 was the first version of Windows that I found to be worthwhile.

[@theformerkaiser9391]

And to think 30 years later, modern versions of Windows are still based on NT. Tells you how good of a base it is.

[@jorgemoreira2406]

I agree ,brilliant ❤ from portugal

[@olli2591]

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]

Much like every other mainstream operating system based on the principles of Unix from the early 70s.

[@wysoft]

​@@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.

[@JollyGiant19]

@@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!

[@judewestburner]

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

[@windowsxseven]

tf is paas? Pornography as a service? Pizza and a sandwich? Peers as associated shitheads? Elaborate

[@AureliusR]

Only problem with your comment is this has absolutely nothing to do with NT4. This episode Is all about NT3/3.5

[@judewestburner]

@@AureliusR so what?

[@tr1p1ea]

Buggy as hell from my first experience.

[@judewestburner]

@@tr1p1ea NT 3.x was pretty rough. NT4 provided you treated it with respect when it comes to drivers, it was next gen

[@SikoSoft]

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.

[@russellhamner4898]

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.

[@MattExzy]

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.

[@mrsleep0000]

It was fucking shit all right...

[@AliasXZ]

@@vinhtran9308 Windows has always been shit

[@baghdadiabdellatif1581]

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 .

[@gerwin030]

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.

[@OpenGL4ever]

Well, i use Linux everyday. The only exception is for some games for which i keep Windows 10 as a dual boot setup.

[@judenihal]

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.

[@Dr.W.Krueger]

@@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.

[@judenihal]

@@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

[@alanvonweltin6820]

The person talking about Cairo really demonstrates the difference between program and product management

[@murraybragg6091]

The show and the people involved are legends in the pc industry. Thank you for a fantastic show Stewart.

[@saskiavanhoutert6081]

Yes, where would we be without Bill Gates and other programmers, thanks and kind regards.

[@davem45]

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.

[@SilverBullet93GT]

in soviet russia, the end users support the OS when it goes to sleep :)

[@jeffwads]

I remember running multiple simultaneous applications (animations) and being amazed at how well NT 4 handled them versus Windows 95, etc.

[@raven4k998]

I gotta a good feeling about this windows nt thing I think it's going to be Huge!

[@TH3C001]

@@raven4k998 Bah! It'll never take off!

[@raven4k998]

@@TH3C001 ok buy me a new tesla model 3 performance then

[@Chordonblue]

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.

[@MattF340]

@@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.

[@retroguy74]

"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

[@the_expidition427]

Retro Active Actually most atms are running OS/2 and XP

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

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!

[@ant.upptech]

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.

[@JonnyInfinite]

Frankie and Bennys use NT 4 on their terminals

[@procastnator]

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

[@captainkeyboard1007]

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.

[@leepeyton4101]

Poor Cairo, this video is awesome. David Cutler's team did great work!

[@gjw000]

NT4.0 was rock solid. Impossible to get pcmcia cards working, but was a great OS

[@BillyBobDingledorf]

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.

[@GaryvanderMerwe]

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.

[@davidsutton9117]

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.

[@scottandrew8906]

I love watching this kind of material.

[@raven4k998]

remember to buy an activator from sage for your games dude it's the future I can feel it

[@TheAngelOfDeath01]

Windows NT was an absolute beast for its age. There was absolutely NOTHING like it around.

[@farwestern99]

Well, DEC had some tech that was at least equally powerful on Alpha: Tru64 and OpenVMS were titans of the era.

[@Frostie3672]

Totally disagree, the amiga & workbench operating system was so much better than what the pc had at the time.

[@oldtwinsna8347]

@@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.

[@sunnohh]

Least factual comment of all time op, nt was microsoft slapshodily implementing good ideas from real oses

[@alfabètagamma-k7p]

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)

[@OneAndOnlyMe]

Even with modern GPUs, no other Windows edition matched the smoothness with which the mouse cursor could be moved in NT4.

[@n10cities]

That was back when Novell ruled the network world. Good times.

[@raven4k998]

Novell will rise again!

[@OhNotThat]

1000 years later, and to this very day I am still copying that floppy. Sue me SPA!

[@kasimirdenhertog3516]

Say what you want, but the bearded Unix guy is still the coolest kid today, with his SGI Indigo 😎

[@saurondp]

SGIs were awesome.

[@raven4k998]

@@saurondp yeah with there flight simulator os's those things looked so cool

[@krunkle5136]

Amazing that he even developed the software he used for art.

[@kamratframjandet]

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)

[@oldtwinsna8347]

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 I could go back to 1993 knowing what I know now without the trauma from it. I could relax for a bit then prepare. I was 16...

[@altaccount8749]

I wish this show still went on

[@christineayres5339]

The ladies certainly do if you skip to 19 min mark LMAO it looks like a Penis ha ha

[@andresbravo2003]

Happy 30th Birthday Windows NT!

[@subzeroarctics1299]

Forward 30 years later and we’re going back to RISC again, because RISC is king

[@BlownMacTruck]

Uh, it never left and you might want to check how modern x86 works.

[@OpenGL4ever]

The x86 is RISC since the Pentium Pro. It does use microops to do the x86 operations.

[@frankiethefish73]

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.

[@knerduno5942]

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.

[@joshstucki4349]

For anyone younger than 35, Windows NT is still alive - Windows 11 is merely another successor to this great OS.

[@Todd_Manus]

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.

[@inwerp]

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"

[@TheSteveSteele]

Well, they’re not demonstrating with a laptop are they? Most laptops throttle. x86 as a laptop CPU won’t be around much longer.

[@inwerp]

@@TheSteveSteele most nowadays apple laptops throttle, that's true und thats exactly the point. But there is no one to answer the question.

[@inwerp]

@@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.

[@nnnnnn3647]

Thats why Apple go for Apple silicon.

[@TheRattyBiker]

I never got to play with NT4 but when I upgraded (3.11 - 98SE - 2000) I immediately loved 2000, stable, fast and powerful.

[@atrocitasinterfector]

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

[@EnronnSierra]

Its amazing the longevity of the NT kernel, development started in 1989 and its still in use 35 years later and is wide spread. Dave Cutler who was the principal architect mentioned in an interview on Dave's garage channel probably about on 20% of the original code remains in todays Windows 11. It will likely decline in the coming years.

[@87Wayne]

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]

Windows NT 4.0 before 2000 was like Win 98

[@GenOner]

@@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

[@Lofote]

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.

[@judenihal]

@@Lofote Windows NT 3.x has Windows 3.1 shell, NT4 had Windows 95 shell, Windows 2000 had Windows ME shell.

[@Lofote]

@@judenihal 2000 came before ME, so if at all ME had a lousy copy of the 2000 shell (minus the font). ;)

[@Aranimda]

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!

[@respectforkurt944]

and Windows XP, Vista, 7 and so on. Windows 95 and 98 and definately M.E were abhominations.

[@justiny.1773]

I still use and love 98 SE

[@MF175mp]

if you want to use also Dos regularly and have zero issues it's nice to have a win 98 machine of that era

[@Lofote]

@@MF175mp With DOSBOX I see no use in running DOS at all anymore physically ;)..

[@MF175mp]

@@Lofote I see

[@soyroberto2527]

The story of NT is interesting, there's a book about it called, 'Showstopper'

[@winterheat]

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

[@axa993]

This UI is actually extremely intuitive and pretty.

[@alexeysamokhin9629]

Last 15 years of UI “innovation” was in fact a degradation.

[@OpenGL4ever]

@@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.

[@jacobbaranowski]

Blockbuster CD rom movies oh boy how times have changed dam I'm old

[@ccopmp]

Sometimes miss these old days

[@gingerblue2265]

Nostalgia 😊

[@haroldasvelioniskis223]

I still using win nt 4 workstation

[@HBC101TVStudios]

@Невада большевик don't you mean Windows NT 6.4?

[@powershellaxp64]

@@HBC101TVStudios What are you using, the old ass expired Tech Previews? Open cmd and it will say Version 10.0.whatever

[@HBC101TVStudios]

@@powershellaxp64 Wiem, że to NT 10.0. I'm just tricking him with the original NT version of Windows 10 😂

[@powershellaxp64]

@@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.

[@valenrn8657]

@@HBC101TVStudios Windows 10 = Windows NT 10. WIndows 8.1 = Windows NT 6.3

[@djquick]

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.

[@danielniffenegger7698]

Amazing the things we just take for granted

[@FlyboyHelosim]

Back when Microsoft tried to make new versions of Windows look like old ones...

[@jeffreymend]

Mike Nash is my uncle! Absolute legend

[@E_Stew]

I remember this show back in the day...I used to watch it all the time. 😊

[@nameistunbekannt7896]

Unix users look all the same... long hair + big beard

[@GeoNeilUK]

I'm bald.

[@nameistunbekannt7896]

GeoNeilUK so, u Windows ?

[@GeoNeilUK]

NameIst Unbekannt No

[@Fiilis1]

propably mac user lol

[@josht4583]

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."

[@justsurfin5013]

Had no idea Windowa NT was in development even during the win 3.1 era. Wow. I remember supporting NT workstation 4.0 back in the day

[@sandmanxo]

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.

[@tipstricksss1453]

Computers were so amazing back then.

[@hanialadham4336]

Man i love the 1990's!!

[@christineayres5339]

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

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...

[@brentsummers7377]

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.

[@DITUnited]

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

[@helms7k]

Wow! Really forgot how big computer towers used to be!

[@dukenukem5768]

I've still got one that big. Has four hard drives and a tape drive in it.

[@andywolan]

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!

[@LanceHall]

I loved this show.

[@Psythik]

At least you were lucky enough to see it when it was airing.

[@MaheshWalatara]

I remember when I was at TAFE in Melbourne in the late 90s the computers had NT and it would take 15 minutes to log in and get to actual work

[@jaysworld5378]

Novell, now there's a name I haven't heard in ages

[@savagex9000]

I used to watch this when I was a kid.

[@diegolara4202]

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

[@chriscannon8527]

They wouldn't be a very good presenter if they replied with that lol

[@Drizzt_Do_Entreri]

the host always grates on my nerves by being so pushy and impatient. it's annoying.

[@darrenfalconer3267]

seeing that even the four password options are still the same to this day is weird(couldnt think of best word to describe it)

[@videosuperhighway7655]

Wow Quad core systems in 1993!

[@RdVortex]

VIDEOSUPERHIGHWAY Probably not an actual quad-core processor but rather a computer with 4 invividual CPUs. Multi-core processors weren't really around back then.

[@ThunderKat]

Is the base of all supercomputers up to dates...So is basicly a supercomputer with 4x single core CPUs.

[@daviddavis5471]

Only for SX processors, all full CPU's such as DX models had Math co-processors built in. These were Quad CPU and NOT Quad Core.

[@christineayres5339]

Probably hyperthreaded single core not a true quad core but still impressive for 93 , considering my uncle who is a wealthy buisnessman paid 2 grand for his PC and only got a cpu with like an 60mhz pentium processor lol but it was the most powerful Intel cpu in 93 he should have waited 5 years as then you could get cpus with 733mhz power lol

[@andree1991]

the absolute unit of a computer that fucking tower was. I honestly don't think i have ever seen a tower THAT big

[@danielrbsutton]

It is a tower worthy of being called a TOWER!

[@OpenGL4ever]

The disadvantage of these old towers is that with the beginning of the Pentium 3 CPUs it was not possible to accommodate a clever cooler. These towers were just too narrow for that. Today's MIDI towers are much wider and you can easily fit a decent CPU fan with a large heat sink.

[@dougjohnson4266]

This video was when back-in-the-day when MS wanted to make one usable interface not a hidden mess of hell that Windows has morphed into.

[@DBR00]

I used to love this show.

[@dominicskywalker]

Win NT4.0 walked so that Win 2000 could jog so that Win XP could run so that proceding versions could fly.

[@erik....]

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.

[@BlownMacTruck]

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.

[@ChrisAldridgeNC]

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.

[@blower1]

@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.

[@OpenGL4ever]

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.

[@DynamioPL]

​@@BlownMacTruck and starting with Windows 2000, gaming on NT started to be possible, thanks to support for same DirectX versions as Windows 9x

[@spankroy]

Love the guy with the monitor like 4 feet to the right of him and his desk.

[@user-ge4uk9ui8y]

Windows 10 runs off the same kernel this runs off, amazing

[@user-ge4uk9ui8y]

@@chbrules It's the same kernel, windows 10 just has some additional features added in.

[@HBC101TVStudios]

@@chbrulesWindows 10 still uses the same old kernel from Windows NT3.. It’s just that more code are added into the kernel. The Windows NT kernel itself is like a spaghetti nowadays.

[@Rouhalla]

I remember early 2000 my first CAD Application on Windows 98 SP2.. What an amazing time..

[@kevinjhonson5925]

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.

[@saurondp]

Network and sound cards were nearly impossible to configure correctly in NT 4. I don't miss those days at all.

[@rjon2a]

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.

[@SubzeroMKG]

Oh how far we've come from then to Server 2022.

[@Ojisan642]

FYI, the Windows NT being referred to in this video is NT 3.5, not the NT 4.0 that everyone is familiar with.

[@terminusaquo1980]

Not even 3.5, its NT 3.1

[@drygnfyre]

This was a 1993 episode, it was actually 3.1, the first release. NT 3.5 wasn't released until 1995, just a few months before Windows 95. NT 4 came out in 1996 and had the 9x-era UI by default. (It was available for NT 3.5 but as an add-on known as NewShell).

[@jeffwads]

The Virtuoso application demo'd at 16:10 was never released.

[@JimmyDoresHairDye]

Look at the size of that tower. It's a monster.

[@hmbrz]

so much of this stuff is still on windows 10

[@maboroshi1986]

+hmbrz windows 10 is a descendant of the original windows nt. besides Most of that stuff could just be said to be essential operating system tools

[@markarca6360]

It started in Windows 2000 (it was built on Windows NT technologies) and continues even today in Windows 10.

[@CristianCarvajalC]

I would like the Windows 2000 theme on 10

[@Patrick_AUBRY]

@@CristianCarvajalC The possibility ended with windows 7

[@oldtwinsna8347]

Operating systems are ridiculously complex things to develop so it's always an evolutionary process that builds upon itself and refines over time but has an underlying heritage that can be traced back to its origins. Often the end user just sees this visually but it goes way deeper than that.

[@XTBounty]

Windows NT was Microsoft's business operating system, released in 1993. Windows 1.0 to Windows Millennium Edition, were Microsoft's consumer operating systems. Windows XP was the first system that was made for business users and consumers alike, and from then on, Windows has been a unified operating system, although there are various editions of each system.

[@judenihal]

microsoft is very delusional, business users used windows 1.0 to millennium edition, you can log into the domain from windows 95 to me and it was so much more simpler to deploy.

[@RoyanGreenwood23]

Don't copy that floppy :)

[@DITUnited]

Wild how this was just 30 years ago

[@tyyr2370]

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.

[@jaywv1981]

Don't copy that floppy

[@OliverMorales]

and that why Windows XP was so popular, because was the contact of the audience with Windows NT

[@soenkeruempler]

Happy 30th birthday!

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

5:02 Cairo never made it to production quality.

[@jonathanvanier]

The funny thing about Cairo is that it is extremely similar in concept to Longhorn (new user interface, new database-like file system, etc.). Both projects failed to reach their goals. Both were led by Jim Alchin. And both contributed a limited amount of user interface work to the next version of Windows (the early work on Cairo UI became the new Win95 shell, and of course Longhorn UI morphed into Vista). But to this day, Microsoft has failed to bring to life the Cairo/Longhorn vision.

[@lawrencedoliveiro9104]

@@jonathanvanier You have to admit, the whole idea of tying the GUI inextricably into the OS kernel is one that should have been left behind in the 1990s.

[@alexeysamokhin9629]

@@jonathanvanier Avalon from Longhorn becomes WPF, Indigo becomes WCF, parts of WinFS land as FILESTREAM in SQL Server, but of course the Grande Idea of Longhorn failed miserably.

[@m.necatisepetcioglu4391]

Mike was my boss at Tesla a decade ago.

[@garthhowe297]

Geez... that long ago? I still have my cloth/suede Windows NT jacket that Microsoft gave me for getting my MCSE in NT 4.0.

[@Odinintheflames]

I didn´t get anything for my MCSE NT4 :(

[@SilverBullet93GT]

When i got my W2K server mcse, i got an e-mail asking me to start preparing for the W Server 2003 exams :))))

[@JustAMindlessDrone]

I've been using MS products since dos 3.0, the first time I purchased a product was Windows 10 and still regret it.

[@eclecticreader961]

I read about Windows NT recently. It served as a great Enterprise platform. I imagine that this must have hiked up the dial-up internet bill to an extravagant rate. For those who were not entrepreneurs in need of an enterprise connectivity, I think it’s safe to assume that crowd stuck with MS-DOS 6.22 and/or Windows 3.1 (launched as of 1992).

[@drygnfyre]

The NT kernel wouldn't be seen on a consumer-oriented release of Windows until XP. The main reason was earlier versions of NT didn't have great MS-DOS support. I think originally, the plan was to have Windows 2000 be the "OS for everyone," but due to various delays, the timing was moved up a year, and Windows ME was a stopgap product intended to sort of bridge the gap. Otherwise, it's what you said: NT prior to XP was geared towards the enterprise market, and would have been very unusual to see on a personal desktop. (I did see it on many office computers, though).

[@jaqian]

Wow NT server isnt that different from 2016. Different GUI obviously but permissions etc look very similar.

[@Lofote]

Yes, the rights and permissions part is still based on the principles that NT 3.1 brought. The domain concept however was completely redone with Windows 2000 (=NT 5.0), but even that didn't change only in details since 2000.

[@jakecosenza69]

That SF Nordstroms just closed...sad times

[@eddyeroyal6024]

I miss this show, I started my career with military and EDS at this time.

[@BastetFurry]

13:00, and then came the neckbeard-cliche...

[@peterfi.]

+Bastet Furry All Unix users without exception are overweight bearded men

[@Vanessinha91Pucca]

+P. Dophile Well at least this overweight beard man was a pioneer of his kind :P the first of many to come... then after the ctrl+c it is ctrl+v till today

[@kuntosjedebil]

Intel? Worst. Hardware. Ever.

[@TheRus13]

And how well it all started....Different processors and architectures.And now?