Programming Windows: The Windows NT Death March (Premium)

In March 1991, the NT team hit a new milestone: Dog food came to the NT build lab. So not only were NT team members and a select small group elsewhere in Microsoft running on NT, the build lab was too. Microsoft was using NT to build NT.

Elsewhere, confusion reigned. NT architect Dave Cutler wanted to ship a lean, mean version of the product first and add new features later. But Bob Muglia wanted to NT to change the industry, to include new features big and small that would make the product better. Cutler referred to Muglia’s feature requests as “an endless list of shit.”

But some of Muglia’s features were great ideas. Key among them was a way to map the DOS 8.3 file name convention with the 255-character file names that were allowed by OS/2 and NTFS. (Anyone who’s used Windows 95 will remember this mapping, where a file name like Paul’s document.doc would appear in DOS as PAUL’S~1.DOC.)

It was the right thing to do, but this addition delayed the availability of NTFS, to July 1991, triggering another round of schedule rethinking. And some were pushing to drop features like NTFS in order to meet the then-current NT schedule, in which the product was to be code complete by Halloween. Surprisingly, Cutler intervened: They would make the new file system and it would ship in the first version of NT.

Cutler’s concerns about feature creep later took a humorous turn when Microsoft president Steve Ballmer said publicly that NT would feature something called “fault tolerance,” which was news to the NT team. He has misspoken, but two NT team members were inspired to make it happen.

Throughout 1991, the team’s dogfooding expanded. First to graphics, which replaced a “Lite” command-line-only version of NT, and to networking, in which the team finally abandoned the outdated LAN Manager software that had originated with OS/2. Instead, NT would run on both PCs and servers, with the latter providing shared access to files and applications. It was a great goal, but it made dogfooding difficult, because when a server crashed, it affected everyone on the team. The first networking-capable build of NT arrived in mid-August.

By that point, the NT code base was about 80 percent complete and it seemed like hitting code complete by Halloween was possible. But Paul Maritz, who had previously led Microsoft’s OS/2 efforts, identified a key missing piece: Security. He gathered the top leaders on the NT team and asked whether it was possible for him to store a spreadsheet in NT that only Bill Gates could access. The answer was no, so Maritz sent them back to the drawing board. NT needed to have the pervasive security features that business customers demanded.

Maritz had created a nightmare scenario for the NT team. But he also gave them more time, understanding that there was no way a more secure version of NT could be completed by the end of October. As a result, the NT team lost several more months, but it also created...