It is pretty easy to find an old Cairo release online for retro machine tinkering. Those interested in a more casual poke around in NT 4.0 out of interest, curiosity, or nostalgia will find there are some online installs you can play with via a web browser.
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Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason. ","collapsible":{"enabled":true,"maxHeight":250,"readMoreText":"Read more","readLessText":"Read less"}}), "https://slice.vanilla.futurecdn.net/13-4-25/js/authorBio.js"); } else { console.error('%c FTE ','background: #9306F9; color: #ffffff','no lazy slice hydration function available'); } Mark Tyson Social Links Navigation News Editor Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.
abufrejoval NT 4 was both a declaration of war and a disaster. It was a declaration of war against Citrix, who had established NT as a multi-user OS on NT 3.5 and from whom M$ decided to withhold the NT4 source code, which it needed to upgrade its customers. Instead M$ wanted to grab that entire market away from Citrix and pushed their less capable RDP protocol over ICA or vendors like Tektronix (and NFuse?) who had built X11 support into NT 3.51. M$ brought Citrix to the brink of failure and poisoned the multi-user market for years. It was also a disaster because it compromised security over speed. Running the graphics UI at ring 3 in proper user mode turned out to be so slow, that M$ decided to let it rip at ring 0 or kernel mode, where a buggy graphics driver killed an otherwise pretty bullet proof VMS clone OS. Printer drivers were even worse, because your average dot matrix or inkjet printer driver often wasn't thread-safe: I remember terminal servers with 50 users going down, just because someone dared to print a document on a dual CPU machine! I often wonder how Dave Cutler, the DEC VMS architect lured to M$ to design an OS/2 and Unix killer survived those days where greed for market share and power killed his design. Reply
EzzyB abufrejoval said: NT 4 was both a declaration of war and a disaster. It was a declaration of war against Citrix, who had established NT as a multi-user OS on NT 3.5 and from whom M$ decided to withhold the NT4 source code, which it needed to upgrade its customers. Instead M$ wanted to grab that entire market away from Citrix and pushed their less capable RDP protocol over ICA or vendors like Tektronix (and NFuse?) who had built X11 support into NT 3.51. M$ brought Citrix to the brink of failure and poisoned the multi-user market for years. It was also a disaster because it compromised security over speed. Running the graphics UI at ring 3 in proper user mode turned out to be so slow, that M$ decided to let it rip at ring 0 or kernel mode, where a buggy graphics driver killed an otherwise pretty bullet proof VMS clone OS. Printer drivers were even worse, because your average dot matrix or inkjet printer driver often wasn't thread-safe: I remember terminal servers with 50 users going down, just because someone dared to print a document on a dual CPU machine! I often wonder how Dave Cutler, the DEC VMS architect lured to M$ to design an OS/2 and Unix killer survived those days where greed for market share and power killed his design. I saw it more as an assault on Novell. I recall at the time the Novell drivers for a Windows desktop had ballooned to 60mb (HUGE for the day when a HDD might be 300mb) and all of a sudden we could just eliminate that on desktops. Anyway, our first victim at the Corps of Engineers was Novell. As for the server version. Uggggh! Internet Information Server was a disaster of biblical proportions. (Actually, now that I think of it, it was on the workstation version as well.) Reply
JeffreyP55 Admin said: Microsoft released Windows NT 4.0 to manufacturing partners on this day in 1996. Windows NT 4.0 brought the Win95 UI to servers 30 years ago today — milestone unifying modern Windows OS hit RTM in the Pentium era : Read more NT with a Windows '95 face. I used it in the day. Reply
abufrejoval EzzyB said: I saw it more as an assault on Novell. I recall at the time the Novell drivers for a Windows desktop had ballooned to 60mb (HUGE for the day when a HDD might be 300mb) and all of a sudden we could just eliminate that on desktops. Anyway, our first victim at the Corps of Engineers was Novell. As for the server version. Uggggh! Internet Information Server was a disaster of biblical proportions. (Actually, now that I think of it, it was on the workstation version as well.) I only ever dealt with Novell as a user, can't say that I cared for it in any which way. And their treatment of DOS and Unix didn't exactly endear them to me. But yeah, M$ still had plenty of enemies and was giving all similarly hostile treatment. I don't know when AD entered the picture, that was the real nail into Novell's coffin: UID management is one of those things where M$ was relentless when it came to licensing. These days I just rejoice in how easy this is with Samba, especially in Univention: no M$ licenses required at all, except for the client OS, if you need that. Reply
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- https://www.tomshardware.com/software/windows/windows-nt-4-0-brought-the-win95-ui-to-servers-30-years-ago-today-milestone-unifying-modern-windows-os-hit-rtm-in-the-pentium-era#main
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