It's time to bring back Windows NT | Hacker News Reader

It's time to bring back Windows NT

winsupersite.com

"Tech old-timers like myself fondly remember Windows NT and all it stood for"

This is just rose tinted glasses really.

Remember all the "there must be a better way" conversations that were rampant in the NT3/4 eras. If you're in any doubt, pick up any old IT magazine of the 90s and remind yourself what we were concerned about. Things that Windows 8 does in its stride: hardware compatability, backups, speed - these are distant memories these days.

Usability was a bigger problem then than now. Fewer people in general had any idea about computers - how many can recall a first hand experience of a new-start talking into the mouse as a microphone (or similar caper).

If when you started your career, Windows NT was the shiny new thing, then maybe you would remember it fondly. You wouldn't know any better.

For me, Windows NT was like some kind of joke that nobody understood, instead taking it as a serious server platform even though it had uptimes usually measured in hours or, if you were really lucky, days. I'm pretty sure server admins at the time would be seeing Blue Screens of Death in their nightmares.

I made tons of cash developing for NT both for clients and for myself. I loved the platform and loved clear, well defined and well documented set of Win32 API's, exceptional debugging tools and development tools. And then came Ballmer with his complete lack of vision, absence of creativity, bigger-than-god ego and "me-too" business strategy producing nothing but mediocre and frustrating copycat products and services.

I deviated from development for Microsoft platform as it became overbloated with useless and then quietly abandoned with layers and layers of miscellaneous technologies.

Microsoft superiority is gradually rusting away by more creative and intelligent tools and solutions from other vendors. Until Ballmer is there - I do not think we can see any major improvements or anything even close to revolutionary new directions.

I wish Bill Gates would take a few months break from developing advanced toilets for Africa and clean up his old beautiful house, starting from the attic.

What the author is really saying is "Drop metro and brand the resulting product NT". It's broadly what everyone else in corporate IT has been saying since Metro (or whatever it's now called) was announced. It reflects the fact that touch screen interfaces and twitter feeds are redundant for people who use windows for work. I agree with the premise, but the article is quite a long winded way of saying it.

Just ditch the MS stuff and come to the *nix/bsd side, pasture is a lot greener.

There is no *NIX/BSD side to speak of.

I mean, sure, as a server Linux is exceptional. But as a client it is not even competitive in the business environment.

It isn't cost effective, time effective, or even well supported.

What do you think OSX is based on?

I wouldn't use OSX in an enterprise either. For almost exactly the same reasons.

What's wrong with OS X in the enterprise?

Many large companies have ended up with large installations because of a choose-your-own-laptop policy.

I hope to see a day when the perception of modern Linux environments will change. Ubuntu for example is more than capable of being used in a business environment.

You can use anything in an enterprise if you have infinite budgets and time.

Ubuntu is easily the furthest any Linux vendor has come at producing a workable client, but there is still a long way to go.

Right now managing Ubuntu centrally is painful - I mean having it hook into Kerberos is easy enough but that only gives you control over users and remote files, you still have little control or visibility over the client OS its self.

Care to explain?

I think Canonical offers a service for this.

You want me to explain away your vague hand waving?

No, I mistakenly thought you could have some insight on the matter.

Building a remote management solution that can mix the functionality of Active Directory and LDAP with Chef is one of the startup ideas I've been pondering lately.

My clients will once Unixy programmers port over all the productive applications they rely on to *nix/bsd. Get working!

I think using Windows Server Core nodes for actual work and a dedicated node for administration and UI has more potential than Windows NT ever had. And honestly, Windows NT was a nightmare. It seemed compatible with Win95/98, but wasn't entirely. And I'm not talking about DirectX here. Back in the days, a HP-67 was a major innovation and some people didn't know what they ever did before getting one, but no one would really want them back today, right?

Instead of a whole new windows how about this:

Disable "Metro" = true, Enable Start Button = true

Done! Now you have Windows 8 NT

I agree with this article, but I think the way they suggest fixing it is over-kill.

What they're proposing is to have a new SKU for businesses/schools/etc. But having a new SKU will be expensive. More to maintain. More to market. More DVDs to ship. More QA. And so on. There is no way to view a new SKU such that it SAVES money.

What I would like to see is for Microsoft to keep the same number of SKUs but to give consumers more choice. Windows 2008 and 2012 Server come with two modes of installation - core and standard.

The issue with Windows 8 in particular is not that it has Metro ("modern"), it is that they forced people to use it. If they had just allowed people to install the Windows client in a "business" mode, people would have been happy.

So maybe Windows 9 needs a client equivalent of "core" mode. Essentially cut away all of the crud until you're left with a Windows 2000-like desktop experience, no thrills, no fun, just the absolutely basics of what Windows is.

I know a few old time Windows IT people, when they mention NT it's usually in the same sentence as a cuss word.

For a long time, NT stood for "Not Tested".

Remember that Windows NT used to crash after 49.71 days when the uptime counter overflowed. Most people never noticed this because the server would crash for other reasons long before that.

It was windows "No Thanks" in my circles. But win 2000 was a gem - I liked it much more than XP back in the day.

Win2k was as good as Microsoft got. Reliable, stable, functional. Happily that was the last Windows platform I developed for.

Apart from the fact you had to reboot to change just about anything and there was no USB support, it wasn't bad for the era.

Stable where MacOS at the time was anything but, with the no-nonsense Windows 95 theming. As far as a desktop operating system, it was a pretty good package.

You didn't have the command-line tooling of Linux, but at least you could install it on your computer without having to dive into X configuration hell.

Pretty sure Win2k did have USB support, though you may have needed to install a SP.

At the time the "service pack" was called Windows XP. Maybe they added it after XP came out, though.

This is like reminiscing over days that seemed better but probably weren't. NT was fine, though I did get more bsods with it than I did with OS/2 during the time I used it. Wrote a lot of fun code using Windows 95 and 2000, but wrote a lot of fun stuff using DOS as well. Made about the same money with all of them.

Well it's kind of double edged, there where a lot of people who where forced to move from Unix workstations to NT because it supported some windows apps and companies wanted to standardize on Windows. Those people generally cuss the advent of NT. On the other hand people that where forced to try to maintain a all Windows shop with only 3.11 and 95 hailed it as a saving grace as trying to serve a Workgroup from 95 or 3.11 was an exercise in frustration so was any serious workstation type work.

Microsoft will never do this now that Paul has written the idea down in public, at least not with the NT name. No manager in Microsoft will push to reuse the NT brand and risk being called out on getting the idea from Paul Thurrott.

Windows Server 2012 can already be a bare bone command line server without GUI. As far as workstations are concerned, the corporate world would hardly see Win8 for a long time to come. By that time, things will be changed anyway and/or the IT folks would strip the heck out of Win8 gui to suit their corporate environment.

PS: I don't know much about the author except to say that his About Me section is terribly written piece for any stranger visiting his site.

correct me if i am wrong, but don't windows XP/2000 and windows 7 both use significant parts of the NT kernel, and aren't they the best OSs MS offers?

You are correct my good man. Came here to say YOU ARE USING NT.

The actual version numbers:

  2000: NT 5.0
  XP: NT 5.1
  Vista: NT 6.0
  7: NT 6.1
  8: NT 6.2

Nostalgia for a time that never existed doesn't bring the world to a better place. It certainly doesn't help the state of technology.

Or you know ... microsoft should drop the "emulate badly Apple" act and show real innovation.

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