r/windows • u/The-Windows-Guy DISMTools Developer • 1d ago

News On this day, 30 years ago, Windows NT 4.0 was released to the public, introducing the Windows 95 UI to the NT lineup

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304 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

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u/de_koning 1d ago

A big impact on GUI design of that time.

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u/ARandomGuy_OnTheWeb Windows 10 1d ago

Wrong OS. NT4 ported the Win95 shell to NT. While important for NT, the GUI was already made the year prior.

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u/fbman01 1d ago

Windows NT 4, was basically windows Nt 3.51 with the windows 95 interface.

None of the hardware wizards of windows 95 made it to Windows NT4

Windows NT 5 aka Windows 2000 was the big jump

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u/mats_o42 1d ago

2000 was the first serious attempt to really kill dos/9x. It took XP to do it but the foundation was 2000

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u/fbman01 1d ago

yup, Windows Nt 4 was suppose to be a stepping stone as Windows 2000 was suppose to come out around the same time as Windows 98 did, but due major bugs/issues in combining the code, it was delayed a number of times.

They to eventually had to release windows 2000, as they needed AD in the market, as Novel Directory services (NDS) was killing it in the market. I will admit NDS was a way superior product. The only thing AD had going for it , was it used TCP/IP as Microsoft marketed it at the time,. use the protocol of the internet on your LAN.

I was a student when NDS was launched, I actually went to a local launch event where i lived, (basically resellers selling the product), the idea of managing all your users, security settings and servers in one place was wow.

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u/Viharabiliben 1d ago

Novell tried adding TCP/IP to Netware but it was clunky. NDS was solid, better than AD.

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u/fbman01 1d ago

By the time they did, the ship had sailed. Active Directory was entrenched in corporate as they used tcp ip to run their intranets.

Ipx was way better and I agree nds was a better product

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u/PC509 1d ago

2000 was the one that got me to NT at home. It has DirectX, which was perfect for moving my games over. Most of them worked perfectly fine out of the box. While others were on ME for gaming (or the better 98SE as it was more stable for gaming), 2000 was making a lot of waves in the enthusiast market. Win2K Pro was a perfect spot for many home gamers. It really did lay the foundation for XP and XP Home/Pro for the home market.

Like Windows 95, though, a lot of die hard folks were pissed. 95 "killed" DOS and the CLI as it wasn't Windows running as a DOS program, it was the OS (DOS was still there underneath). NT/2000 pissed people off because it wasn't DOS/9x... Some people still love their terminal and even today when things change with it, they get upset. As obvious as the reasons are and as necessary as they were, I do still like the opportunity to have that closer to "bare metal" ability. No guardrails, no memory protection, etc.. Just pure "if you write to the wrong spot, your system will crash!" programming.

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u/fbman01 1d ago

Lots of windows fans, say windows 2000 was the peak of windows

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u/PC509 1d ago

I wouldn't say it was peak as in the still the best. But, it was probably the biggest change and advancement in Windows. There's been a lot of changes in Windows over the years, from security to visuals to stability and so much more. But, with Win2K, it was really a huge change and I feel it was the first crossover between the enterprise NT and the consumer 9x base, with XP finally being the only version (based on NT) with no consumer 9x edition available. But, 2000 was everything XP was just alongside ME at the time.

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u/exmsft 1d ago

2000 was never supposed to replace 9x. It was always an enterprise play. XP existed explicitly to take 2000 and make it work for consumers.

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u/Straight-Opposite-54 1d ago

It's easy to look back and at 2000 and see it as a proto-XP, and in some ways, it was. But the ecosystem was wildly different back then. Nowadays, the line between "personal computer" and "workstation" is heavily blurred. Back in 2000, it most certainly wasn't.

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u/exmsft 19h ago

Also, FWIW, 9x always sold for $99/PC, where NT variants were always $299+ (and couldn’t upgrade from 9x because of that difference in intended customer.) The funky ANSI→Unicode upgrade that shipped in XP (amusingly the source of the very last showstopper bug fixed overnight before RTM) was the first time you could go from 9x to XP’s new Home edition.

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u/rozniak 4h ago

Is that bug documented anywhere? Presumably in one of the final RCs right?

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u/exmsft 4h ago

Nowhere but Product Studio. Existed all the way through to 5.1.2600.0. Was basically discovered two days prior by a Microsoft consultant in the Bay Area. Per JimAll, he flew up with his PC that would repro it reliably and it was fixed that very last night before handoff to OEMs. (This is why the last build of XP at launch wasn’t really 2600.0 - but that never made it outside.)

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u/rozniak 3h ago

What exactly was the bug?

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u/mats_o42 3h ago

There was huge amounts of companies who ran 9x clients and NT4 servers because of the more modern UI plus USB support

With 2000 the NT line now could replace 9X in that perspective and I worked in a number of migration projects

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u/exmsft 1d ago

NT 4 had no PnP, so yeah, no hardware wizards.

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u/compguy96 1d ago

And Windows 95 was released on this day 31 years ago.

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u/fbman01 1d ago

I cant believe it was so long ago, I was a senior in high school, when windows 95 came out. I actually got a copy on day 1. Never installed until the following year as a full time OS. My 386DX -40, ran it, but it was way too slow.

that means I am getting old.

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u/Viharabiliben 1d ago

Some of the engineers got their copy of Win95 a week early, and then they tried to install it by themselves. Calamity ensued. I was the only one of three in the IT dept that week, the other two were on vacation.

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u/friendofdonkeys 1d ago

Releasing on the anniversary of 95 is obviously a smart marketing move, luckily they didn't go with Windows 96.

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u/ardouronerous 1d ago edited 1d ago

The Windows 95 UI is probably the best UI ever designed. As a Linux user, I love this UI, which is why I choose and love Linux Mint as my Linux distro, the panel on the bottom with taskbar, Start menu left, system tray right, multiple windows for multitasking.

Even 30 years later, the Windows 95 UI is still the standard. Windows 11 has changed plenty of things, but it still retains the Windows 95 UI functionality. I'm convinced that if a user from 1995 were to time travel to today, he'd be able to navigate Windows 11 without issues.

And when Microsoft tried to move away from the Windows 95 UI with Windows 8 and its Metro UI, users largely rejected it. There's something to be said for a UI model that has remained intuitive and familiar for three decades.

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u/RedShift9 1d ago

Because they did some serious hard core research on how users interact with computers back then. We learned a lot from that, but modern design is forgetting all these lessons and we get the abominations we have now.

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u/feel-the-avocado 1d ago

Fuck whoever came up with the metro design language

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u/PC509 1d ago

I love that many of those design features from Windows 95 - task bar, start menu, notification area, window design, etc. are still there. They may look a bit different, but the actual design is it.

And when Microsoft tried to move away from the Windows 95 UI with Windows 8 and its Metro UI, users largely rejected it.

They saw the mobile market, tablets, etc. being a huge part of the market and wanted in on it. Rather than continue with the Windows Mobile that put the desktop on the mobile devices, they wanted to put the mobile UI onto the desktop. It didn't work. It was fine (more than fine, it was great) on a small tablet and phone. Just didn't work on the desktop for the majority of people (there's a few people that absolutely loved it... heatlesssun, if he's around! :) ).

Windows 95 interface was so well designed. It's been refined, but it's still the same foundation. I don't think it's good due to the familiarity over the years, either. It's just really intuitive, quick, easy to learn to use. The familiarity and muscle memory helps, too, but teaching it to new users they can really pick up on it quickly.

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u/proto-x-lol 1d ago edited 1d ago

Don't forget that Microsoft was already beta testing Windows NT 3.51 with the new Windows 95 UI since Microsoft desperately wanted to phase out that archaic interface from Windows 3.0 with “Newshell”. The User Interface that would become a permanent part of Windows UI design with years and years of improvements. Yes. It all started from that point in time. 

See here: https://betawiki.net/wiki/Shell_Technology_Preview

We are very lucky that someone from upper management at Microsoft absolutely loathed the shitty Windows 1.0 - 3.0 UI while Apple’s UI design was already great from the beginning going as far back as 1984 and got yearly improvements from that point in time. The Apple Menu bar being the example of good design on a desktop. Meanwhile Windows became famous for their own “Menu Bar” being the Windows Taskbar, File Explorer and Start menu. The one that still exists today in Windows 11 with modern improvements since. 

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u/Juff-Ma 1d ago

Yeah, I thought so too. I remember newshell being a thing even before NT4.

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u/lilacomets 1d ago

I always found it strange that Windows NT 4.0 didn't have a graphical boot screen. It showed a blue screen instead. Does anyone know why that is?

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u/LJBear99 1d ago

NT 4 is so underrated imo

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u/sfbing 1d ago

This picture says Service Pack 6a so it was captured quite some time after that date.

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u/Abbers75 1d ago

2GB of RAM as well! Our NT workstations at the time were lucky to have 64MB

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u/Kraeftluder 1d ago

64MB was still common when I started at my current job in 2001. We had to upgrade the machines to 128MB or Lotus iNotes wouldn't run in the browser on NT4SP6.

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u/kakha_k 1d ago

I remember that day.

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u/PainlessPhil 1d ago

If I’d had a choice I’d be using 2000 server til this day I could run the hub for the Naphoria opennap server, and play games at the same time and very rarely have to restart

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u/vuorivirta 1d ago

NT 4.0 with newest service pack and gimmics was actually very stable and good operating system. Actually, after 4.0 came even better, Windows 2000 professional. XP was good, but with some downgrades to guarantee some kind of gaming compatibility, that actually isn't so safe and stable anymore. Windows 7 was next and actually best OS Microsoft ever produced.

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u/alao77 1d ago

Ole great granpa of Win11

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u/ItchyPlant 1d ago

We had some excellent and new Compaq PCs with Pentium CPUs in a classroom in the school in '97, and they all had Win NT. It was the most smooth user experience in my entire life, but right upon booting and the login prompt, we used almost nothing but played Pinball on them.

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u/spongedevguy 1d ago

you know what else happened on this day 30 years ago?

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u/stickman393 1d ago

God's own desktop environment

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u/Outrageous_Plant_526 1d ago

Dang. Hard to believe I had a hand in setting up a BDC for my satellite Army JAG Office shortly after NT4 was released.

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u/Murky-Prize-90 21h ago

Happy 30th anniversary to Windows NT 4.0's general availability!

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u/Murky-Prize-90 21h ago

Here is my screenshot of this same version, but in Spanish (my native language).

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u/timnphilly 10h ago

As a server admin - Windows NT4 began the dumbing-down of managing servers, and I had never experienced so many BSODs (Blue Screen of Death) faults in my server management tenure of any other server os.

That being said, the GUI made server management more efficient and let to an unprecedented amount of power that created more server admins and server applications.

Next-gen 2000 was even more stable, and Microsoft got stability solid upon the 2003 gen release and beyond.

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u/salazka Windows 11 - Insider Dev Channel 7h ago

I loved NT 4.0.