Programming Windows: NT (Premium)

In Showstopper! The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft, author G. Pascal Zachary recounts the amazing story of how Microsoft created the product that it eventually named Windows NT. I highly recommend this book to everyone reading this series of articles, in part because it is much closer to my ideal for such books than are most industry titles. And, as such, it serves as one of many inspirations for what I’m now writing.

That is, most industry books are more interested in discussing companies, personalities, and strategies than they are in discussing products. But I’ve always been most fascinated by the latter. And this is where Showstoppers really succeeds for me: It’s as much about the product as it is about the company and people who created it. And I love that.

As such, I can’t really hope to surpass what Zachary wrote. So, I will instead off a recap of NT’s early years, before it turned into Windows NT. In a future article, I will continue the story of how Windows NT finally came together and then eventually turned into just Windows.

(Fun aside. NT stands for “New Technology.” I suspect that this name was created posthumously, but there it is.)

The story of NT is the story of Dave Cutler, a systems programming genius who had previously built real-time operating systems for the Digital PDP-11. Cutler, like Gates, was fond of creating the smallest possible code to get the job done. His motto was simple: “Size is the goal.” And he had a rubber stamp made with that phrase so that he could stamp rejections on code that was too large.

In 1985, Cutler was working for DEC in Seattle and he won approval to build a new family of computers named Prism. Its OS was called Mica, and though it was a new design, it would also run Vax applications, assuring that customers could move forward. Prism was billed as a supercomputer at one-tenth the price. But it was canceled in June 1988, and Digital told Cutler it would disband his Seattle-based hardware group.

At that time, Windows was failing and OS/2 was Microsoft's future. But OS/2 was looking more and more like a disaster: IBM had seized control of the project and it wouldn’t run Windows programs. Worse, a new generation of RISC computer systems were coming, threatening the CISC-based PC platform. So, Gates told Microsoft chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold to write a “Unix killer.” He wanted a “portable” OS that would run on multiple platforms just in case.

And then two worlds collided. A Myhrvold staffer told him on August 4, 1988 that Cutler’s Prism project was canceled and that he wanted out of DEC. So, Myhrvold told Gates about the opportunity that had suddenly presented itself.

“It was like an amazing coincidence,” said Gates, who had never met Cutler. “I very much wanted to a portable OS. It was not a question of if, but when we could get the team together to do it.”

A meeting was arran...