You failed as the Unix-killer Bill Gates envisioned but we had some good times together and powered many a workstation. Wiki tells me the release was on July 26, 1993; same day but half a century later than Mick Jagger's.
So sorry I am a day late, but I remember you could be a bit slow on the uptake as well, showing me that hourglass. Never mind though, you helped programmers around the globe the chance to break free and use gigabytes of memory as transparent as you could get.
On top of that you promised portability. Every program written for you would run on architectures far beyond the mundane X86. Exciting architectures like Alpha, Mips, even the mighty Itanium in later years were suddenly in the realm of coders. Write once, execute everywhere. It was a great dream.
Of course your heydays are over. You live on of course, but silently, in Windows 8 which as we all know is just you, hiding as NT version 6.2.
A zillion *nixes drove you away from the server market, but you survived as everybody's best friend on the desktop. Your death is expected, iOS is close to outselling you, Android circles around you, but for those who need performance you're still the old friend.
Luckily little nephew Windows RT failed to steal your throne and that hyped-up Apple version of Unix couldn't get you out of business.
Maybe that simple mind Chrome will be the heir to your throne. Maybe one of the *nix flavors will succeed in convincing consumers that they are ready to step in to your light. Maybe your heritage is just lost and the grand operating system powering servers and desktops is put to bed and replaced by smartened up browsers.
Whatever the future might bring: like Mick Jagger your greatest hits were in the past, but they defined a period and we had a good time together. Hats off to you sir! #Tech
Just made me shudder +Max Huijgen you typed the W word (!)
Yes +Lee Smallwood sort of coming out post 😉
Should have added that the image is of a CD: difficult to explain nowadays. let's say you would have a small part of the internet stored in bits and bytes. Now imagine you want to transfer that part of the internet without using that same internet!
Yes, not easy, but it was solved by some very old engineers. They put it on a sort of record. Hell, I give up….
LOL @ +Max Huijgen , back in the closet sir, no one wants to seen that!
NT4.0 is what finally pried me away from Mac userhood, way back in 1996.
l still refer to my enterprise id/pw as my "NT Login," as I'm sure many others do.
Should give a 'congrats' to father Dave Cutler too.
Yes David Cutler can be proud +Brian Titus
I love how it started with You Fail. epic
这软件是世界上最好的，也永远最好，比Win8好10倍，只有Win8的1/10。
But like Mick's hits, we always like to hear an encore
I was on the beta years ago, and till now I am known as a Merlin to NT happa birthday NT , miss ya
Windows 8.1 will be NT 6.3 +Georges Pauly All is not lost 🙂
oh ! i remember this one :-))
"New Technology" LOL.
Ой, я помню!
did some course work at mid kent college using such software
CD? My copy of NT came on I don't know how many floppy disks!
the first beta, yes, later CD (one) I still got it here
It will be a sad day in history when toy OS's like iOS or Android take the place of a full blown desktop OS.
Fortunately, after dozens of predictions of the death of the PC, NT lived to be 20 years and people still get to use the productivity and power of a real computer, regardless of what OS they prefer to use.
Here's to hoping we can muster the intelligence to let consumption devices be consumption devices and letting productivity devices be productivity devices for at least another 20 years.
Linux will be 22 this year.
Max = hilarious, today!
Every sysadmin's worst nightmare… having to configure/admin servers manually, one-by-one, with a GUI. Google probably would have never gotten their operation off the ground if they had taken the MSFT route…
MSFT sold NT to non-tech execs who could relate to it from their desktops. Dilbert action all the way…
+Gijs van Dijk you must know that there is hardly any difference between Android and a 'full fledged' Linux distro + desktop. And it certainly isn't a toy. In fact I already know people who use Android as a desktop system. The distinction is becoming moot.
I was talking about the workstation OS, not the server version +Alex Schleber And it was an enabling technology: we moved from closed source, highly expensive Irix graphic workstations to stuff 1/3 of the price and without annual maintenance contracts.
Without NT Workstation we wouldn't have seen the spread of 3D.
You're funny +Marc Roelofs but I'm afraid I haven't had as much of the Linux or Android kool-aid as you seem to have had. 🙂
And as much as I dislike Windows, I doubt we will ever see eye to eye on this subject.
That's a good point +Max Huijgen, most heavy duty CAD / graphics / 3D work was being done on Vaxes, Macs and Irix boxes back then. They were considered by IT execs at the time be the outside or legacy choices (especially Vaxes). NT Workstation did open new opportunities but it really was do to technical ignorance (execs not knowing there were ways to get the systems on one network) and of course the MS kool-aid.
I don't miss those days but there are still times now where I see organizations making the same mistakes when comes to comparing Linux or other foss solutions to the popular solution.
+Keith C. Perry +Alex Schleber the dominant force in office networking at that time was Novell Netware so NT workstation was not driven by the existence of Windows networks.