These days the #FreeBSD-derived #Darwin powering #Apple's operating systems has about the same installed base as #Windows. Adding the de facto Unix #Linux and derivatives like #Android easily eclipses Microsoft's efforts several times over.
I built a PC/XT #clone (8086, #DOS 3.2) in 1987. Before I saw Windows 3 run. "DOS For Dummies" had not yet spawned a franchise. Amber monitor.
I built a #Pentium II box in 1998. Ran #WindowsNT? and I got #Debian to.boot on it. I was still innocent of a "GPU"—I didn't even bother with a sound card. Ran #Emacs under Windows!
Have not touched hardware since then. GOLLY THINGS SURE HAVE CHANGED
@thurrott Dave Cutler said only 20% of the original code from the first version of #WindowsNT is in #Windows11 today. Even he expects it to be rewritten and go down further. It’s interesting to think but in the next 10 years, what we know as Windows today might be a completely different operating system under the hood.
💿🖥️ Windows NT 4.0 (1996) brought many improvements, including the visual appearance from Windows 95. As was common for NT at that time, it supported architectures such as x86, Alpha, MIPS, and PowerPC. It was available in editions such as Workstation, Server, and Terminal Server (pictured).
On this day in tech history, Microsoft introduced Windows NT 3.5.
Windows NT 3.5 introduced improved networking capabilities and enhanced performance such as integrated Winsock and TCP/IP support, support for the VFAT file system, Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) version 2.0 and support for input/output completion ports
NT 3.1 through Server 2003 was the sweet spot for me. Back when thr system did what you want and otherwise stayed out of the way. Windows has been all downhill from there...
It is pretty interesting watching the Computer Chronicles roll out coverage of the original WindowsNT in 1993. It makes me want to fire up a VM and play with it and/or Windows 3.11 again for some UI nostalgia. It is interesting seeing all the features we've gotten used to in Windows with the modern interface but using the Windows 3.1 style interface. One interesting tidbit which I didn't realize until last week was that NT supported symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) from the original release on. Meanwhile when Apple acquired NeXT in 1997 NeXTSTEP still did not support SMP. My first foray into WindowsNT didn't come until the late-1990s when our engineering labs were equipped with computers running NT 4.0 but none of them had multiple processors. I wouldn't get my first multiprocessor machine until the early-2000s when I was attempting to parallelize algorithms for the software company I then worked in...running WindowsXP by then. #ComputerHistory#ComputerChronicles#Windows#WindowsNT The Computer Chronicles - Windows NT (1993)