Windows NT, every mention
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every year 2024 anyone Ben Gilbert 22David Rosenthal 10Steve Ballmer 3
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Windows NT comes up
Microsoft Volume II: The Complete History and Strategy of the Ballmer Years (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:21:25 David Rosenthal It unifies Windows under the NT architecture.
- ▶ 1:36:37 Ben Gilbert There's NT slash back office.
- ▶ 1:36:48 Ben Gilbert So you can think about it as Windows, and he said NT slash back office, but this is the enterprise, an office.
- ▶ 1:36:54 David Rosenthal Which is so funny that Bill thought of it as NT slash back office.
- ▶ 1:37:02 Ben Gilbert Bill was like, it's like this stuff that businesses buy, but I'm gonna refer to it by its Microsoft product name of one of the products we sell, which is NT.
- ▶ 1:37:22 Ben Gilbert So he's talking about the interesting thing, the server business, which is a different way he refers to NT slash back office.
- ▶ 1:37:54 David Rosenthal Ok, so we did talk last time about NT and Dave Cutler and the heroics that he performed to write NT.
- ▶ 1:38:03 David Rosenthal Windows NT, though, was still a client operating system architecture for a user to use a personal computer with.
- ▶ 1:38:13 Ben Gilbert NT basically was enterprise ready.
- ▶ 1:43:33 Ben Gilbert You then have NT as the operating system, SQL as the database, and then you've got all these other applications that basically run on that stack.
- ▶ 1:59:21 Ben Gilbert There was Windows NT for
- ▶ 1:59:51 Ben Gilbert And so the knock against NT was always, well, you need really beefy enterprise grade PCs to run it, and it's not as nice and intuitive, and the knock against the Windows nine X, call it 95, was that, yeah, it looks pretty, but it's not…
- ▶ 2:00:18 Ben Gilbert Did the impossible where they figured out how to take the ease of use of the nine X interface and make it run on top of NT.
- ▶ 2:00:30 Ben Gilbert The whole thing is built on the NT kernel and it has the friendly, approachable ease of use that you are used to in windows.
- ▶ 2:00:52 Ben Gilbert And so you had the NT lineage of, I guess, maybe even you could say it started with OS two, but Windows NT, Windows 2000, and then Windows XP.
- ▶ 2:49:44 David Rosenthal Satya joined Microsoft first in 1992 from Sun Microsystems, and he joined as an evangelist for Windows NT.
- ▶ 3:42:14 Ben Gilbert Dave was the architect on Windows NT.
Microsoft Volume I: The Complete History and Strategy of founding through Windows 95 (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:52:12 Ben Gilbert I mean, the prestigious thing to work on at Microsoft was OS two and eventually Windows NT, but the Windows team in the Windows three era is almost like the Mac team over at Apple.
- ▶ 3:05:50 Ben Gilbert And all of this stuff is pretty out of scope for this episode, including all the software systems you would need to build for the enterprise, like Windows NT Server and Exchange and SQL Server and Active Directory, like the classic mid-two…
- ▶ 3:09:15 Ben Gilbert But we have two chapters left in this episode, and they happen concurrently within the systems group by two very, very different teams, and that is Windows-Ninety-five and Windows NT.
- ▶ 3:09:29 Ben Gilbert Let's start with NT, and then our little cherry on top can be, uh, 95 to close us out.
- ▶ 3:09:34 Ben Gilbert How did Windows NT happen?
- ▶ 3:09:40 David Rosenthal Okay, so Windows NT.
- ▶ 3:10:03 David Rosenthal NT is after the divorce, Microsoft being like, screw that.
- ▶ 3:12:00 David Rosenthal So NT, we'll talk a lot more about it on the next episode, but spoiler alert, it is the vision of what IBM wanted OS to to be, but it's Microsoft's version of it.
- ▶ 3:12:35 David Rosenthal The punchline here is that NT becomes the seeds of Windows Server, the business line, which become the seeds of Azure today.
- ▶ 3:12:45 Ben Gilbert So the other important takeaway on NT is it was gonna take a long time to build, it was gonna take a long time to test, it was gonna take a long time to sell and deploy, and it was gonna have really strict requirements for what it could…
- ▶ 3:13:39 Ben Gilbert Ok, I think what that basically ends up meaning a few years later is one application programming interface, API, that developers can target so that when they want to write a Windows app, it works on both NT and whatever the evolution of…
- ▶ 3:14:17 Ben Gilbert And so, for many years, they would display very differently on NT systems versus, spoiler alert, Windows 95, the successor to Windows three dot one.
- ▶ 3:17:03 Ben Gilbert Now, mind you, NT had already come out in 1993, so Cairo is sort of this general bucket of maybe it's post-NT, maybe it's part of NT, but this is like a really sophisticated, crazy set of technologies that we're gonna eventually bake into…