WINDOWS NT 4.0

'Windows NT 4.0' is the fourth release of Microsoft's Windows NT line of operating systems, released to manufacturing on July 29 1996. It is a 32-bit Windows system available in both workstation and server editions with a graphical environment similar to that of Windows 95. The "NT" designation in the product's title initially stood for "New Technology" according to Microsoft's then-CEO Bill Gates, but now no longer has any specific meaning.
While providing greater stability than Windows 95, it was also less flexible from a desktop perspective. Much of the stability is gained by virtualising the hardware and having software applications access the system APIs rather than the hardware directly as was done in DOS-based versions, including Windows 95, 98, 98SE, and ME. The trade-off is that writing to the APIs rather than hardware directly requires much more work be done by the computer and so hardware intensive applications such as games run much slower. While many programs written for the Win32 API will run on both Windows 95 and Windows NT, the majority of 3D games will not, due in part to NT 4.0 having limited support for DirectX.
Windows NT 4.0 is also less user-friendly than Windows 95 when it comes to certain maintenance and management tasks; there is, for instance, no device management overview of the PC's hardware.
The dichotomy between the NT and "9x" lines of Windows ended with the arrival of Windows XP, by which time the gaming APIs—such as OpenGL and DirectX—had matured sufficiently to be more efficient to write for than common PC hardware and the hardware itself had become powerful enough to handle the API processing overhead acceptably.
Windows NT 4.0 was the last major release of NT to support the Alpha, MIPS or PowerPC CPU architectures. Windows NT 4.0 was rendered obsolete with the advent of Windows 2000 but is still (as of 2005) in widespread use despite Microsoft's many efforts to persuade customers to upgrade to more recent versions. It was also the last release in the Windows NT line to use the "Windows NT" name. NT 4.0 is the last Windows NT Server OS to use the now discontinued BackOffice feature.

Contents

Features

Service Packs

Editions

Servers

Client

Security

External links

References

Features

Most noticeable was that both the workstation and server editions of Windows NT 4.0 had gained the user interface of Windows 95, including the Windows Shell, Windows Explorer (known as Windows NT Explorer), and the use of "My" nomenclature (e.g. My Documents).
The server editions of Windows NT 4.0 include a built-in web server, Internet Information Services version 2.0. It also natively supported plugins and extensions of Microsoft FrontPage, a web site creation and management application.
Other important features included with this release were ''Microsoft Transaction Server'' for network applications, and Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ), which improved communication.
One significant change from previous versions of Windows NT was that the Graphics Device Interface (GDI) was incorporated into the kernel^[2] to speed up the Graphical user interface (GUI), which resulted in a significant performance improvement over Windows NT 3.51, but also created the requirement to have graphics drivers located in the kernel, resulting in potential stability issues.
One drawback to Windows NT 4.0 was its lack of support for Direct3D. This however was resolved in all future releases of the NT family such as Windows 2000. Windows NT 4.0 also did not support USB, but that was also fixed with the release of Windows 2000. Third party utilities also exist that provide DirectX and USB support within Windows NT 4.0.
A distinctive feature of Windows NT 4.0 was its round analog clock, dropped from all subsequent versions of Windows until Windows Vista, where it reappeared ten years later -- though as a Sidebar gadget and not as a standalone application. The analog clock applet (included in all previous Windows versions, except for Windows 95) could only display the clock in a square window. However, those previous versions didn't have the taskbar with digital clock in it, and thus inclusion of both taskbar clock and standalone clock applet was considered redundant.

Service Packs

Microsoft released Windows NT 4.0 service packs primarily to fix bugs. Windows NT 4.0, during the product's lifecycle, had several service packs, as well as numerous service rollup packages and option packs. The last full service pack was Service Pack 6a (SP6a).

Software	Date
Release To Manufacture (RTM)	July 29 1996
General release	August 24 1996
Service Pack 1	October 16 1996
Service Pack 2	December 14 1996
Service Pack 3	May 15 1997
Service Pack 4	October 25 1998
Service Pack 5	May 4 1999
Service Pack 6	November 22 1999
Service Pack 6a	November 30 1999
Post Service Pack 6a Security Rollup	July 26 2001

A SP7 was planned at one stage in early 2001, but this became the ''Post SP6a Security Rollup'' and not a full Service Pack.^[3]
The service packs and an option pack were also released to add features. These included newer versions of Internet Information Services, versions 3.0, and 4.0, support for Active Server Pages, public-key and certificate authority functionality, smart card support, improved symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) scalability, clustering capabilities, and component object model (COM) support, among others.

Editions

Servers

★ 'Windows NT 4.0 Server', released in 1996, was designed for small-scale business server systems.

★ 'Windows NT 4.0 Server, Enterprise Edition', released in 1997, is the precursor to the 'Enterprise' line of the Windows server family. Enterprise Server was designed for high-demand, high-traffic networks.

★ 'Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server', released in 1998, allows the users to log on remotely. The same functionality was called ''Terminal Services'' in Windows 2000, and ''Remote Desktop'' in Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.
Windows NT 4.0 Server was included in versions 4.0 and 4.5 of BackOffice Small Business Server suite.

Client

★ 'Windows NT 4.0 Workstation' was designed for use as the general business desktop OS. Boasting a pure 32-Bit environment, with excellent stability, it quickly became a success for its intended market.

★ 'Windows NT 4.0 Embedded' was designed for special function devices like an ATM or kiosk.

Security

On December 31, 2004, Microsoft stopped providing security updates for Windows NT 4.0, due to major security flaws including MS03-010, which according to Microsoft could not be patched without significant changes to the core operating system. According to the security bulletin, "Due to [the] fundamental differences between Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 and its successors, it is infeasible to rebuild the software for Windows NT 4.0 to eliminate the vulnerability. To do so would require rearchitecting a very significant amount of the Windows NT 4.0 operating system, and [...] there would be no assurance that applications designed to run on Windows NT 4.0 would continue to operate on the patched system."
Between June 2003 and June 2007, 127 security flaws were identified and patched in Windows 2000 Server, many of which may also affect Windows NT 4.0; however, Microsoft doesn't test security bulletins against unsupported software. Because of this, Microsoft is recommending current Windows NT customers to upgrade to a supported operating system such as Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003, or the upcoming Windows Server 2008.

External links

★ Windows NT Workstation 4.0 Official Product Page

★ Windows NT Server 4.0 Official Product Page

★ Guidebook: Windows NT 4.0 Gallery – A website dedicated to preserving and showcasing Graphical User Interfaces

★ HPC:Factor Windows NT 4.0 Workstation Patches & Updates Guide

★ HPC:Factor Windows NT 4.0 Server Patches & Updates Guide

★ Windows NT 4.0 Reference Material

References

1. Windows Operating System Product Support Lifecycle FAQ
2. Windows IT Pro - Windows NT 4.0, April 1996
3. NT4 Service Pack 7 Cancelled Byron Alley


★ Windows IT Pro, Windows NT 4.0