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Windows NT 3.1
 
 
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Windows NT 3.1 is the first release of Microsoft
Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is a multinational corporation computer technology corporation that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of computer software products for computing devices....
's Windows NT
Windows NT

Windows NT is a family of operating systems produced by Microsoft, the first version of which was released in July 1993. It was originally designed to be a powerful high-level-language-based, processor-independent, multiprocessing, multiuser operating system with features comparable to Unix....
 line of server
Server (computing)

A server is a computer program that provides services to other computer programs , in the same or other computer. The physical computer that runs a server program is also often referred to as server....
 and business desktop operating system
Operating system

An operating system is an interface between hardware and applications; it is responsible for the management and coordination of activities and the sharing of the limited resources of the computer....
s, and was released to manufacturing on 27 July 1993. The version number was chosen to match the one of Windows 3.1, the then-latest operating environment
Operating environment

In computing, an operating environment is the environment in which users run Computer program, whether in a command-line interface, such as in MS-DOS or the Unix shell, or in a graphical user interface, such as in the Mac OS, or a web browser for web-based applications....
 from Microsoft
Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is a multinational corporation computer technology corporation that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of computer software products for computing devices....
, on account of the similar visual appearance of the user interface. Two editions of NT 3.1 were made available, Windows NT 3.1 and Windows NT Advanced Server. It was succeeded by Windows NT 3.5
Windows NT 3.5

Windows NT 3.5 is the second release of the Microsoft Windows NT operating system. It was released on September 21 1994.One of the primary goals during Windows NT 3.5's development was to increase the speed of the operating system; as a result, the project was given the codename "Daytona" in reference to the Daytona International Speedway...
 in September 1994.

It could run on Intel x86, DEC Alpha
DEC Alpha

Alpha, originally known as Alpha AXP, was a 64-bit reduced instruction set computer instruction set architecture developed by Digital Equipment Corporation , designed to replace the 32-bit VAX complex instruction set computer ISA and its implementations....
, and MIPS R4000
MIPS architecture

MIPS is a RISC instruction set architecture developed by MIPS Technologies . In the mid to late 1990s, it was estimated that one in three RISC microprocessors produced were MIPS implementations....
 CPUs.

lopment of Windows NT started in November 1988, after Microsoft hired a group of developers from Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation

Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering United States company in the computer industry. It is often referred to within the computing industry as DEC ....
 led by Dave Cutler
Dave Cutler

David Neil Cutler, Sr. is an United States software engineer, designer and developer of several operating systems including the RSX-11M, OpenVMS and VAXELN systems of Digital Equipment Corporation and Windows NT of Microsoft....
.






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Windows NT 3.1 is the first release of Microsoft
Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is a multinational corporation computer technology corporation that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of computer software products for computing devices....
's Windows NT
Windows NT

Windows NT is a family of operating systems produced by Microsoft, the first version of which was released in July 1993. It was originally designed to be a powerful high-level-language-based, processor-independent, multiprocessing, multiuser operating system with features comparable to Unix....
 line of server
Server (computing)

A server is a computer program that provides services to other computer programs , in the same or other computer. The physical computer that runs a server program is also often referred to as server....
 and business desktop operating system
Operating system

An operating system is an interface between hardware and applications; it is responsible for the management and coordination of activities and the sharing of the limited resources of the computer....
s, and was released to manufacturing on 27 July 1993. The version number was chosen to match the one of Windows 3.1, the then-latest operating environment
Operating environment

In computing, an operating environment is the environment in which users run Computer program, whether in a command-line interface, such as in MS-DOS or the Unix shell, or in a graphical user interface, such as in the Mac OS, or a web browser for web-based applications....
 from Microsoft
Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is a multinational corporation computer technology corporation that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of computer software products for computing devices....
, on account of the similar visual appearance of the user interface. Two editions of NT 3.1 were made available, Windows NT 3.1 and Windows NT Advanced Server. It was succeeded by Windows NT 3.5
Windows NT 3.5

Windows NT 3.5 is the second release of the Microsoft Windows NT operating system. It was released on September 21 1994.One of the primary goals during Windows NT 3.5's development was to increase the speed of the operating system; as a result, the project was given the codename "Daytona" in reference to the Daytona International Speedway...
 in September 1994.

It could run on Intel x86, DEC Alpha
DEC Alpha

Alpha, originally known as Alpha AXP, was a 64-bit reduced instruction set computer instruction set architecture developed by Digital Equipment Corporation , designed to replace the 32-bit VAX complex instruction set computer ISA and its implementations....
, and MIPS R4000
MIPS architecture

MIPS is a RISC instruction set architecture developed by MIPS Technologies . In the mid to late 1990s, it was estimated that one in three RISC microprocessors produced were MIPS implementations....
 CPUs.

Development

Development of Windows NT started in November 1988, after Microsoft hired a group of developers from Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation

Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering United States company in the computer industry. It is often referred to within the computing industry as DEC ....
 led by Dave Cutler
Dave Cutler

David Neil Cutler, Sr. is an United States software engineer, designer and developer of several operating systems including the RSX-11M, OpenVMS and VAXELN systems of Digital Equipment Corporation and Windows NT of Microsoft....
. Many elements of the design reflect earlier DEC experience with VMS and RSX-11
RSX-11

RSX-11 is a family of real-time operating systems mainly for PDP-11 computers created by Digital Equipment Corporation , common in the late 1970s and early 1980s....
. The operating system was designed to run on multiple instruction set architectures and multiple hardware platforms within each architecture. The platform dependencies are largely hidden from the rest of the system by a kernel mode module called the HAL
Hardware abstraction layer

A hardware abstraction layer is an abstraction layer, implemented in software, between the physical Computer hardware of a computer and the Computer software that runs on that computer....
.

Windows NT was originally intended to be OS/2
OS/2

OS/2 is a computer operating system, initially created by Microsoft and IBM, then later developed by IBM exclusively. The name stands for "Operating System/2," because it was introduced as part of the same generation change release as IBM's "IBM Personal System/2 " line of second-generation personal computers....
 3.0, the third version of the operating system developed jointly by Microsoft and IBM. When Windows 3.0
Windows 3.0

Windows 3.0 is the third major release of Microsoft Microsoft Windows, and was released on 22 May 1990. It became the first widely successful version of Windows and a powerful rival to Macintosh and the Commodore Amiga on the GUI front....
 was released in May 1990, it was so successful that Microsoft decided to change the primary application programming interface
Application programming interface

An application programming interface is a set of subroutine, data structures, class and/or Protocol provided by library and/or operating system Service s in order to support the building of applications....
 for the still-unreleased NT OS/2 (as it was then known) from an extended OS/2 API to an extended Windows API
Windows API

The Windows API, informally WinAPI, is Microsoft's core set of application programming interfaces available in the Microsoft Windows operating systems....
. This decision caused tension between Microsoft and IBM, and the collaboration ultimately fell apart. IBM continued OS/2 development alone, while Microsoft continued work on the newly-renamed Windows NT.

The first public demonstration of Windows NT, at the time called "Windows Advanced Server for LAN Manager", was at a developer conference in August 1991, and the product was formally announced at the Spring 1993 Comdex in Atlanta, Georgia
Atlanta, Georgia

Atlanta is the Capital and most populous city in Georgia , as well as the 33rd largest city in the United States of America with a population of 519,145....
.

Application programming interface
Application programming interface

An application programming interface is a set of subroutine, data structures, class and/or Protocol provided by library and/or operating system Service s in order to support the building of applications....
s in Windows NT are implemented as subsystems atop the undocumented Native API
Native API

The Native API is the publicly incompletely documented application programming interface used internally by the Windows NT family of operating systems produced by Microsoft....
; it was this that allowed the late adoption of the Windows API. Windows NT was the first operating system to use Unicode
Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate Character expressed in most of the world's writing systems....
 internally. Windows NT introduced the Win32 API, a 32-bit implementation of the 16-bit Windows API. Most 16-bit Windows applications could be ported to the new system with minimal changes and a recompile. Win32 also provided native API support for many new features, such as networking and multithreading.

The project had a codename of just "NTOS", which is preserved in the filename of the Windows NT kernel, ntoskrnl.exe. Since it was targeted to become the next version of OS/2, a more official name of the project was "NT OS/2". This name is preserved up to now in some Windows NT driver development kit files.

System support

NT was designed from the ground up to be portable to other platforms. All kernel and subsystem code was written in C
C (programming language)

C is a general-purpose computer programming language originally developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories to implement the Unix operating system....
 and C++
C++

C++ is a general-purpose programming language. It is regarded as a middle-level language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level programming language and low-level programming language language features....
. Any differences in core hardware architecture that could not be resolved by a simple recompile (e.g., memory architecture, multi/uniprocessor support) were offloaded to the HAL
Hardware abstraction layer

A hardware abstraction layer is an abstraction layer, implemented in software, between the physical Computer hardware of a computer and the Computer software that runs on that computer....
.

Also, NT's boot architecture borrowed heavily from the ARC
Advanced RISC Computing

Advanced RISC Computing is a specification promulgated by a defunct consortium of computer manufacturers , setting forth a standard MIPS Technologies RISC-based computer Computer hardware and firmware environment....
 initiative, particularly on non-x86 platforms.

i860

Originally, NT was targeted at the Intel i860
Intel i860

The Intel i860 was a RISC microprocessor from Intel, first released in 1989. The i860 was one of Intel's first attempts at an entirely new, high-end instruction set since the failed Intel i432 from the 1980s....
 CPU, codenamed N10 (or "N-Ten").

However, the i860 was "horribly behind schedule", so the NT team used an emulator before i860 prototype systems designed in-house (code-named Dazzle) was available. Support for the other platforms followed later and no public release of NT for i860 systems was made. The rationale for targeting the i860 first was to improve portability and avoid producing an x86-centric design.

x86

NT 3.1 supported the Intel x86 32-bit family (80386 and later). Compared to 16-bit Windows 3.x, NT's driver support was somewhat limited, but most 386 and 486 machines could run NT at least minimally.

MIPS

Windows NT also supported the MIPS R4000
MIPS architecture

MIPS is a RISC instruction set architecture developed by MIPS Technologies . In the mid to late 1990s, it was estimated that one in three RISC microprocessors produced were MIPS implementations....
 processor; specifically MIPS systems following the Advanced RISC Computing
Advanced RISC Computing

Advanced RISC Computing is a specification promulgated by a defunct consortium of computer manufacturers , setting forth a standard MIPS Technologies RISC-based computer Computer hardware and firmware environment....
 (ARC) specification.

Alpha

Early in the NT beta cycle, support was added for the DEC Alpha
DEC Alpha

Alpha, originally known as Alpha AXP, was a 64-bit reduced instruction set computer instruction set architecture developed by Digital Equipment Corporation , designed to replace the 32-bit VAX complex instruction set computer ISA and its implementations....
 processor. However, because the Alpha itself was not released, Microsoft's developers did not have access to production Alpha machines to develop on until shortly before NT shipped. Consequently, NT did not initially ship with Alpha support out of the box: the first packages of NT included a mail-in coupon to receive a free CD of NT 3.1 with Alpha support.

Application compatibility


16-bit Windows

Windows NT provided a 16-bit compatibility subsystem, called "Windows on Windows
Windows on Windows

Windows on Windows, commonly referred to as WOW or WoW, is a critical component for backward compatibility of legacy code in Windows NT-based operating systems....
" (aka WOW), which allowed most Windows 3.x applications to run unmodified on NT. Applications which made direct access to hardware, or depended on DOS-level drivers, were not supported.

In NT 3.1, all 16-bit applications ran within a single WOW process. This meant that a single badly-behaving 16-bit application could shut down the WOW session (and any other 16-bit applications running). However, the operating system itself was insulated, so the WOW process could simply be killed and restarted — a significant step forward for Windows' stability.

32-bit Windows

NT also introduced Win32, a 32-bit implementation of the Windows API. This permitted many 16-bit Windows applications to be recompiled for the system with minimal changes. Win32 also allowed the growing body of 16-bit Windows programmers to leverage their skills on the new system. The Win32 API was maintained (with some modifications) with Windows 95
Windows 95

Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented graphical user interface-based operating system. It was released on August 24, 1995 by Microsoft, and was a significant progression from the company's previous Microsoft Windows products....
, further solidifying its role as Microsoft transitioned users off of the 16-bit platform.

Win32 is a comprehensive API, offering OS services ranging from memory management to UI access. NT prevents all user-level applications from directly accessing hardware. This increases system reliability, at the cost of performance. However, this also means that virtually all Win32 applications relied exclusively on the C/C++ Win32 API; the upshot is that porting such an application to another NT-supported system architecture (e.g., moving from x86 NT to MIPS NT) usually required no more than a recompile (some applications might require minor tweaking, such as if assumptions were made in code about endianness
Endianness

In computing, endianness is the byte ordering used to represent some kind of data. Typical cases are the order in which integer values are stored as bytes in computer memory and the transmission order over a network or other medium....
).

OS/2

Though "NT OS/2" was finally released as "Windows NT", it is largely compatible with HPFS disk volumes and the x86 version supports character-mode
Text user interface

TUI short for: Text User Interface or Textual User Interface , is a retronym that was coined sometime after the invention of graphical user interfaces, to distinguish them from Text-based user interfaces....
 16-bit OS/2 applications. Many of the OS/2 APIs (particularly NetBIOS/LANMan networking APIs) already existed in almost identical forms in both 16-bit OS/2 and DOS/Windows, so these were incorporated into the Win32 API. For most 16-bit OS/2 programs, minimal code changes were necessary to recompile as NT console
Win32 console

Win32 console is a plain text window for console applications within the system of Windows API. A Win32 console has a screen buffer and an input buffer....
 applications
Console application

A console application is a computer program designed to be used via a text-only computer interface, such as a text terminal, the command line interface of some Operating system or the text-based interface included with some Graphical user interface operating systems, such as the Win32 console in Microsoft Windows....
.

OS/2 and Windows also share the concept of Dynamic-Link Libraries
Dynamic-link library

Dynamic-link library , or DLL, is Microsoft's implementation of the shared library concept in the Microsoft Windows and OS/2 operating systems....
 (DLLs). Although the implementation varies somewhat between Windows and OS/2 DLLs, this additional similarity meant that even complex OS/2 applications could usually be converted to NT with little change to the overall design.

POSIX

Windows NT 3.1 included a subsystem that was minimally POSIX
POSIX

POSIX or "Portable Operating System Interface" is the collective name of a family of related standardizations specified by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers to define the application programming interface , along with shell and utilities interfaces for software compatible with variants of the Unix operating system, altho...
-compatible. This was added largely to help spur sales in US government contracts, as many government agencies mandated POSIX compatibility for consideration.

Note that POSIX compatibility is an API-level requirement. That is, one POSIX operating system won't necessarily be able to execute binary files compiled for a different system, even though both are POSIX compliant. POSIX simply specifies that the source code should compile correctly for each system.

The POSIX subsystem in NT 3.1 primarily provided support for UNIX-style file system permissons
File system permissions

Most modern file systems have methods of administering permissions or access rights to specific user and groups of users. These systems control the ability of the users affected to view or make changes to the contents of the file system....
 and long filename
Long filename

Long filenames , spelled "long file names" by Microsoft Corporation, are Microsoft's way of implementing filenames longer than the 8.3 filename, or short-filename, naming scheme used in Microsoft DOS in their modern File Allocation Table and NTFS filesystems....
s (including permitting filename characters that are otherwise illegal for Windows files, and denying some that are normally legal).

Internet Explorer

Microsoft offered Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer

Windows Internet Explorer , commonly abbreviated to IE, is a series of graphical user interface web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems starting in 1995....
 starting with IE2,
Internet Explorer 2

Microsoft Internet Explorer 2 is a graphical web browser released in November 1995 by Microsoft for Windows 95 and Windows NT and in April 1996 for Apple Macintosh and Windows 3.1x....
 and released up to Internet Explorer 5.0
Internet Explorer 5

Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 is a graphical web browser released in March 1999 by Microsoft, primarily for Microsoft Windows, but initially with versions available for Apple Macintosh, Sun Microsystems Solaris , and HP-UX....
 for Windows NT 3.x. Also, a IE 1.5 supported NT, but this patch was actually released after IE2 came out.

Editions

  • Windows NT Advanced Server
  • Windows NT


Networking

NT 3.1 included support for three network protocols: NBF (using the NetBEUI
NetBEUI

NetBIOS Frames or NBF protocol is a non-routable network- and transport-level data communications protocol most commonly used as one of the layers of Microsoft Windows networking in the 1990s....
 API), TCP/IP, and DLC
Data Link Control

In the OSI model Computer network model, Data Link Control is the service provided by the data link layer.Network interface cards have a DLC address that identifies each card; for instance, Ethernet and other types of cards have a 48-bit MAC address built into the cards' firmware when they are manufactured....
.

NetBIOS Frames protocol

At the time of NT's release, NetBIOS Frames protocol (NBF) was the most common protocol on Microsoft LAN Manager
LAN Manager

The LAN Manager was a Network operating system from Microsoft developed in cooperation with 3Com. It was designed to succeed 3Com's 3+Share network server software which ran on top of MS-DOS....
/IBM LAN Server networks. In NT 3.1, it was the only supported protocol for networking with legacy LAN Manager networks, as well as other NT systems. Using NBF, NT could participate in file/print sharing, and NT Advanced Server could act as a Domain Controller
Domain controller

On Windows Server Systems, a domain controller is a Server that responds to security authentication requests within the Windows Server domain....
 (even sharing DC duties with OS/2 LAN Manager servers).

TCP/IP

Windows NT 3.1 was the first Windows operating system to include TCP/IP support as standard. The TCP/IP stack used was SpiderTCP, developed by Spider Systems
Spider Systems

Spider Systems Ltd. was a computer network products company, based in Edinburgh, Scotland. It was founded in 1983 by several former employees of International Computers Limited who had previously worked at ICL's Scottish Development Centre at Dalkeith Palace until its closure earlier that year....
. This was replaced in NT 3.5 with a new stack developed in-house.

The TCP/IP stack included WinSock
Winsock

In computer, the Windows Sockets API, which was later shortened to Winsock, is a technical specification that defines how Microsoft Windows computer network computer software should access protocol stacks, especially TCP/IP....
 and STREAMS
STREAMS

In computer networking, STREAMS is the native framework in UNIX System V for implementing character devices.STREAMS was designed as a modular architecture for implementing full-duplex, bidirectional character I/O between kernel or user space processes and device drivers....
 support, but it was not supported for networking among Microsoft LAN Manager or NT systems. Also, DHCP was not available, so IP addresses had to be manually configured. Support for NBT, DHCP, and WINS was added in NT 3.5.

Data Link Control

Data Link Control (DLC) was supported as a transport protocol for the purpose of communicating with network printers, such as those using an HP
Hewlett-Packard

The Hewlett-Packard Company , commonly referred to as HP, is a technology corporation headquartered in Palo Alto, California, United States....
 JetDirect
Jetdirect

JetDirect is the name of a technology sold by Hewlett-Packard that allows computer printers to be directly attached to a Local Area Network. The most common communication uses Transmission Control Protocol port 9100....
 interface. It could also be used by Microsoft SNA Server
Host Integration Server

Microsoft Host Integration Server is a Gateway providing connectivity between Microsoft Server Message Block and IBM IBM mainframe and IBM System i systems....
 for communication with IBM mainframe
IBM mainframe

IBM mainframes, though perceived as synonymous with mainframe computers in general due to their marketshare, are now technically and specifically IBM's line of business computers that can all trace their design evolution to the IBM System/360....
 systems.

Further reading

  • G. Pascal Zachary (1994). "Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft", Free Press, ISBN 0029356717


External links

  • - A website dedicated to preserving and showcasing Graphical User Interfaces