Programming Windows: NT Everywhere (Premium)

“NT EVERYWHERE! NT EVERYWHERE!” the crowd of mostly male Microsofties chanted, inadvertently channeling a Nazi rally and making the walls pound. I looked nervously at the co-worker who’d snuck into this building on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington. We have to get out of here, I mouthed. “NT EVERYWHERE! NT EVERYWHERE!” There was Jim Allchin, smiling serenely, then chanting the words. “NT EVERYWHERE! NT EVERYWHERE!” There was Steve Ballmer, pumping his fist, somehow louder than the crowd around him, almost crazy-eyed. “NT EVERYWHERE! NT EVERYWHERE!” The coworker nodded, and we edged through the crowd, nervous. “NT EVERYWHERE! NT EVERYWHERE!” There was the door. Almost home. “NT EVERYWHERE! NT EVERYWHERE!” My hand was on the bar, I could see the light. “NT EVERYWHERE! NT EVERYWHERE!” And then it happened. “HEY! YOU TWO GUYS! STOP!”

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Dave Cutler signed off on the first version of Windows NT---which was branded as version 3.1 to match the new DOS-based version of Windows---at 2:30 pm PT on Monday, July 26, 1993. He had been hired by Microsoft almost exactly five years earlier specifically to make this moment happen, and he had taken scores of engineers and hardware experts with him from DEC to create a portable OS for the ages, a Unix killer.

NT’s development had taken a heavy toll on this team and a slowly expanding group of Microsofties that had been let into the inner sanctum. There were divorces and nervous breakdowns. Missed births, birthday parties, and anniversaries. Canceled vacations.

Naturally, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates was “gleeful,” author G. Pascal Zachary wrote in the industry classic Showstopper! The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft. He thanked the NT team for its “super effort,” predicting that Windows NT would “redefine the expectations people have for operating systems.” “No other project of this scale has ever been done before at Microsoft,” an unnamed executive added to Gates’ assessment. Left unsaid: At $150 million in costs, NT was the most expensive software program ever created at any company.

Over on the Cairo team, Jim Allchin was busy leading a team that would build on top of NT and create what had, to that date, been described as the next version of NT. Cairo would add object-orientation to the OS, whatever that meant, in the form of an object-based file system and other improvements.

“NT is a truly amazing accomplishment, probably the most ambitious project ever completed successfully in the world!” he gushed. He was obviously inspired by this, too, since he subsequently set off to create two projects inside Microsoft that were even more ambitious: Cairo and Longhorn. That both were epic failures is, perhaps, a reflection on how difficult it really is to pull off something as ambitious as NT. It was, perhaps, a once in a lifetime event.

Outside of the insular NT team, however, Mic...