Windows NT 4.0

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Windows NT 4.0 is the fourth major 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 workstation and server editions with a graphical environment similar to Windows 95. The "NT" designation in the product's title initially stood for "New Technology" according to Bill Gates, but no longer has any specific meaning.

While more stable than Windows 95, it is 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 and continued with Windows 95 and on. The trade-off is that writing to the APIs rather than to the hardware directly requires much more work be done by the computer and so hardware intensive applications such as games run much more slowly. While many programs written for the Win32 API will run on both Windows 95 and Windows NT, despite support for DirectX, the majority of 3D games will not.

The dichotomy between the NT and "9x" lines of Windows arguably only 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 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.

Features

Most noticeable was that 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 the Windows NT Explorer), and the "My" nomenclature (e.g. My Documents). Many other features of Windows 95 were incorporated as well, such as support for Plug and Play.

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 also 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 kernel[Windows IT Pro - Windows NT 4.0, April 1996] 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 that graphics drivers also be located in the kernel, resulting in potential stability issues.

One thing about Windows NT 4.0 was that it lacked support for Direct3D. But this was resolved in future releases of the NT family in Windows 2000 and beyond.

Service Packs

Microsoft released Windows NT 4.0 service packs primarily to fix problems (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	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.

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.

Other

• 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

There is no fix for the [MS03-010] security issue on Windows NT 4.0 because Microsoft claims that "Due to these 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 not just the RPC component affected. The product of such a rearchitecture effort would be sufficiently incompatible with Windows NT 4.0 that there would be no assurance that applications designed to run on Windows NT 4.0 would continue to operate on the patched system."

Instead, Microsoft suggested that Windows NT 4.0 users protect the NT 4.0 system with a firewall that blocks Port 135.

External links

• [Windows NT Workstation 4.0 Official Product Page]
• [Windows NT Server 4.0 Official Product Page]
• [Screen shots of Windows NT 4.0 Workstation]
• [Guidebook: Windows NT 4.0 Gallery] – A website dedicated to preserving and showcasing Graphical User Interfaces
• [HPC:Factor Windows NT 4.0 Patches & Updates Guide]
• [Windows NT 4.0 Reference Material]

References

 

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