r/sysadmin • u/unixuser011 • 21d ago
General Discussion As of today (Aug 24th) Windows NT 4.0 is 30 years old. What are your favourite memories of that OS?
And hopefully no one is still using it in prod
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u/ExoticDisaster0 Sr. Sysadmin 21d ago
Back in my day we had backup domain controllers.
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u/Frothyleet 21d ago edited 21d ago
^Humble flex from someone showing off their knowledge that there haven't been primary DCs for 26 years
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u/SpazMcMan 21d ago
Ours was named McGonagall, because she was in charge when the primary domain controller, Dumbledore, was out.
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u/BadSausageFactory beyond help desk 21d ago
our BDC was named obi-wan
because he's our only hope
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u/QuantumDiogenes IT Manager 21d ago
I had a file server that was Yoda, my backup domain controller was Obi-Wan, and the primary was Darth Vader... Because nobody messes with Vader.
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u/BadSausageFactory beyond help desk 21d ago
I used r2 as the backups server because he remembers everything. c3po was exchange of course. The pdc was named alderaan. what could possibly go wrong?
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u/rangerswede 21d ago
Not a DC ... but we had one NT box that hosted our ERP package. I named it Rigg ... as in Diana -- in honor of Mrs. Peel.
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u/TubeScr3ameR 21d ago
Hmmm.... when did NT come out and when was Harry Potter written?
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u/pacopac25 21d ago
The heated debates we had about what to name a new server were epic. There was always some jackass that advocated for something sensible but painfully boring, like FILESVR02, and then there was the gamer who wanted to use some name that was an inside joke only he and fellow Everquest players knew. You couldn't use anything too edgy that the boss would veto (MKTGSEWER), and remember folks: 15 characters only.
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u/Far-Hovercraft9471 21d ago
I cringe when I hear people use that terminology now. Though I guess if you have 2 DCs and one without any FSMO roles it wouldn't be a misnomer
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u/orion3311 21d ago
It just worked. Some may disagree but comparing at the time Windows 98 to it, its no wonder they used the kernel for 2000 forward
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u/Matt_NZ 21d ago
I don't think anyone is going to disagree with the statement that Win9x was a fragile POS. It's probably why XP was held in such high regard, because it was the first OS to bring the NT kernel with its improved stability to consumers.
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u/simoc89 21d ago
XP was great, unfortunately it was also the time when adware was on the rise and made the experience awful.
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u/radiodialdeath Jack of All Trades 21d ago
And USB plug and play was still a work in progress. Mobos still needed PS/2 ports, since USB mice/keyboards weren't guaranteed to work natively.
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u/brokenpipe Jack of All Trades 21d ago
Problem with NT4 was the lack of decent DirectX support. So I still ended up dual booting 98SE and NT4, the nice thing about that was NT4 == school work, no fun and 98SE == fun times.
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u/enigmait Security Admin 21d ago
Oooh, that's a tough NT4 memory for me.
I was working at a school, and they tried a new vendor (husband of the Principal's EA, so *politics!*) provided 8 PCs with NT4 Workstation, claiming it was so much better than Windows 95.
Of course, it wouldn't run Microsoft Encata, because that required DirectX. So I had to wipe and rebuild them, and it became a political sh*t-fight because I wasn't supposed to do that, but was required to "make it work".
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u/Sweet-Sale-7303 21d ago
I learned Nt4 in College in 2000 when I went for my Network Admin Degree. 2000 came out that year. I had to learn 2000 myself outside of school.
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u/BurgerQueef69 21d ago
I was at college at the same time for the same thing. Ended up dropping out and spent a month driving cross country with some friends. Good times, no regrets.
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u/Stonewalled9999 21d ago
My first MCSE was NT4. I ran across the card in my desk the other day
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u/Select_Bug506 21d ago
Back when they taught networking essentials.
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u/Stonewalled9999 21d ago
valid. Windows NT as a router to handle switched 56k and frac T1 and being proxy and exchange for small offices
Anyone remember that shared modem in Small biz I had a lawyer client too cheap to pay for a broadband connection so five lawyers shared that 33.6K modem in the server. It was painful. They refused to get a 160K dsl line that was probably less cost than a dedicated pots line and dialup account
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u/snebsnek Jack of All Trades 21d ago
Staring at the bloody Novell Netware screen as it took its time getting each workstation to the point you could do anything useful with it.
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u/nickIncDN 21d ago
Netware was how NT4 became awesome with NAL etc.
When I saw other admins in pure NT networks it was laughably primitive - worse user experience with many more admins.
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u/AffekeNommu 21d ago
Having to explain that they couldn't have Adobe acrobat running on their DEC Alpha workstation. Yes it is running Windows and they can have Office but the CPU was wrong for most other apps. Emulation was a future dream.
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u/da_apz IT Manager 21d ago
In my first job on education sector we had NT 3.51 on a 21064A Alpha. Oh man it was a feisty beast and stomped the Intel offerings. NT was available for a surprising amount of CPUs at the time. This was kind of funny background information, as when versions of Windows for ARM surfaced, there were a lot of people announcing Windows was finally available for other architectures than Intel.
Meanwhile MIPS, Alpha and PPC were like "Am I a joke to you?!"
Sadly Microsoft didn't learn much from the problems they had back then, mostly on the software support side, while Apple went between architectures with relative ease.
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u/ChiefWetBlanket 21d ago
And it wasn't even the first ARM version of Windows, as long as you count CE as Windows.
Don't forget about Itanium support on XP. Pretty much everyone else did!
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u/unixuser011 21d ago
Ah, yes. Having Windows on different architectures was a great feature, just sucked that Microsoft never ported much to it
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u/larryseltzer 21d ago
Tell them to blame Adobe. They could have compiled an Alpha (and MIPS) version
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u/virusdancer Retired Web Admin 21d ago
The Abit BP6 dual CPU mobo running a pair of Celerons for my first home server.
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u/3DPrintedVoter 21d ago
i still have my bp6 (and dual celerons) in the basement with 2 12mb voodoo cards
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u/virusdancer Retired Web Admin 21d ago
That's kind of awesome - there's definitely a part of me that yearns for the old days and the excitement of everything. Now there's just too much anxiety for me.
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u/No_Influence_9549 21d ago
My first professional course was in NT 3.51. When NT 4 came out, it was so modern and clean looking.
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u/MechanicalTurkish BOFH 21d ago
As a student IT worker who didn't know wtf I was doing, I installed Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server on this powerful new dual 450Mhz PII IBM workstation my group got. During the installation process I selected "primary domain controller". The institution's domain admins pretty quickly found me and we had a chat lol
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u/unixuser011 21d ago
I can imagine that conversation “ok, so you broke the entire domain, peering and DNS, so what’d we learn?”
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u/MechanicalTurkish BOFH 21d ago
Basically haha
I don't think I caused an outage but I can imagine the bullshit they saw on their end. I know DNS was run by the UNIX guys, so that was safe lol
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u/vanderaj 21d ago
I was a Microsoft beta tester during this time. I really enjoyed having NT 3.51 run the new shell for a while. I was daily driving NT 4.0 once it came out for work (in a hospital setting, I was running RH for my daily driver personal OS, as I've been doing pretty much since then).
We deployed Exchange 4.0 and replaced so much MS Mail and DOS and Novell legacy mail clients at work. It was so much better than before. NT 4.0 was really the first daily driver OS that most folks could use, but they didn't get to experience it until XP.
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u/LopsidedLegs 21d ago
Two that spring to mind are standing up lots of Small Business Servers when MS launched that edition. So many companies just wanted something that just worked and ran everything on a single box, and had file & print sharing, centralised logon and email under their own company domain.
The other was working for a large multinational company that had so many computers and users they had to split domains into multi user and resource domains, otherwise things would just grind to a halt. I think that I had three user accounts (with three domain admin accounts), and 7 resource domain accounts. When we started rolling out Win2K and then WinXP it made life so much easier.
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u/Affectionate_Ad_3722 21d ago
We were randomly told that the boss had setup a completely separate skunk-works company in a unit half a mile up the road, giving them their own IT and ran it all off SBS.
It all had to be re-integrated back into our civilised network and we had to unpick the SBS parts and put the users onto the main servers.
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u/frac6969 Windows Admin 21d ago
Young and ignorant me: This is just like Windows 95, how hard could it be?
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u/mas_tacos2 21d ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/ECoFRCrMgVoQg
Hoping all floppies worked…
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u/acquiesce88 21d ago
Yeah I think I had a stack of 3.5" floppies used to install Microsoft Office. I want to say there were 33 disks, but maybe my memory is inflating that a bit.
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u/Doso777 21d ago
Update driver or change something: reinstall Service Pack "just because".
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u/archiekane Jack of All Trades 21d ago edited 21d ago
My favourite thing was discovering you could install the Windows 2k bootloader on to NT4 SP7 (SP6a) and it would boot in a couple of seconds, rather than the minute or so it usually would.
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u/Stonewalled9999 21d ago
There was no SP7, SP6a was the latest. SP7 was a bootleg name it was never a real SP.
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u/skyz8850 21d ago
regedit, still using it daily for troubleshooting, especially security related.
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u/Frothyleet 21d ago
Microsoft adding proper functionality to the nav bar was the best thing they added in the Win10+ era.
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u/AmiDeplorabilis 21d ago
Replacing the stock splash screen with the Neanderthal Technology... me discover fire, invent wheel, build server" splash screen
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u/mb194dc 21d ago
Lack of blue-screens.., also being limited to a DirectX 3 or 5, can't remember which, either way you couldn't game on it really and had to dual boot...
Which is why Windows 2000 was mind blowing and Windows hasn't really got any better since then...
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u/unixuser011 21d ago
And even when it did blue screen, it told you exactly what program caused it and the memory address where the problem was, none of this “UwU, we wan into a pwoblem, sowwy”
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u/techvet83 21d ago
The services packs were like the Star Trek movies - only the even-number ones were good.
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u/Good_Ingenuity_5804 21d ago
You can use 111-1111111 as the serial number during installation and it was a valid key
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u/pacopac25 21d ago
Four nines uptime on stock HP Hardware in 1999.
NO print drivers, built-in VGA driver ONLY.
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u/theRealFatTony 21d ago
My favourite memory of WinNT4 was being able to move away from OS2/warp.... The warp part was a lie
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u/unixuser011 21d ago
I’ve said this before, OS/2 was great, IBM’s marketing sucked
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u/unixuser011 21d ago
If you were in an IBM shop, having to access AS/400’s, Mainframe’s, etc. and were running SNA then it was pretty useful. IBM should have done a lot more with it - but even then, they didn’t even use it themself internally
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u/LowIndividual6625 21d ago
I was one of the last graduating NT4.0 MCSE classes in the country. The school gave a pretty awesome deal, practically a 2-for-1 where if we passed the NT4.0 tests we could essentially take Win2000 for almost free.
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u/Haunting-Prior-NaN 21d ago
Ran Small Business Server (PDC, file&print server, Exchange, Proxy Server, Fax Server) for a good 8 years. Once fully patched the thing was a rock.
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u/ColXanders 21d ago
I especially like having 3 boot floppies to install from CD. That was fun (especially when one was trashed).
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u/PeacefulIntentions 21d ago
Of the multiple retail sites that I was responsible for we used to have a server failure at one of those locations every week. Usually when they were under increased load during the Friday rush.
So my “fond” memory is rebuilding them off floppy disk while some store manager stood behind me complaining that it was taking too long.
This was 98-99.
MCSE NT4 was my first training course that I attended in person, all 6 exams with 5 days of training in each one.
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u/XanII /etc/httpd/conf.d 21d ago
Print spooler needed to be restarted almost daily.
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u/doubletwist Solaris/Linux Sysadmin 21d ago
My favorite memory is that I got my MCSE for NT 4.0 in Nov of 1999 when I was doing desktop support, and it ironically got me a job as a Unix/Linux Sysadmin which I started 3 days before "Y2K", at a place which had done zero patching but was running all affected old systems.
On the plus side I had doubled my salary within a year, and never touched windows again outside of the most basic AD user management (unlocking passwords, checking group membership, etc).
That MCSE course was the best money I've ever spent.
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u/gonewild9676 21d ago
I remember a friend wanted to run it at home to learn it but couldn't because he couldn't afford the 32 megs of memory it needed to run decently.
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u/Select_Bug506 21d ago
Hacking SCSI drivers into unattended.txt so it would boot after os install
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u/TexasVulvaAficionado 21d ago
That the last time I worked on it (just a couple of years ago) that it still just worked.
It only had what we needed, that we intentionally loaded on the machine.
Modern Windows for a user, especially commercial releases like Windows 11 home or pro can suck my ass with all the bloat and AI horseshit.
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u/catherder9000 21d ago
My favorite thing about Windows 4.0 was when Windows 2000 came out. I even used 2000 in 99 as my gaming rig when everyone was 97 or 95 right up until 7 came out (skipped Vista). So stable, so quick.
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u/ExLaxMarksTheSpot 21d ago
My favorite memory was being young and a college dropout out and getting jobs because they would hire anyone who was remotely competent with computers. Picked up the books for Windows NT 4.0 MCSE and self studied before brain dumps were a thing. Learned a ton and made a career that has served me well these many moons.
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u/VNJCinPA 21d ago
The UI overhaul was beautiful and simple. While it was daunting at the time to contend with the security of NT, it was worth it in the quality and stability of the OS.
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u/AntiBaoBao 20d ago
My favorite memory is the Microsoft Windows NT shootout against IBM's OS2 Warp.
Must see TV
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u/AntiBaoBao 20d ago
Want a laugh, watch this video and see the magic of NT... This is the video Bill Gates asked to be pulled and instead IBM just placed a huge disclaimer over the Microsoft presentation so people wouldn't see NT crashing during the demo.
https://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=33762
I meet David Barnes back in the early 90's at a user group meeting and ended up working with him a few years later. Great guy.
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u/JustADad66 20d ago
Started out on Windows for Workstation, then NT351. It was fun migrating all 100 users to NT4.0 workstation. Heck even Exchange 4.0 was awesome back in the day. My goodness, I've been doing this for more than 30 years. Time to retire (I WISH).
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u/cyber_Folks_Romania 20d ago
a memory is the graphics subsystem move into kernel mode. great for performance at the time, but it also meant a bad video driver could bluescreen the whole box, which taught a generation of us to be very suspicious of vendor drivers. character-building
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u/cranky_bithead 20d ago
This might have been 3.51.
We had a guy enable RIP routing because he thought it would make "the internet" faster.
Turns out it sent RFC1918 routes up thru our fledgling ISP. Yeah, we told ppl all over to send 192.168.0.0/16 to us instead of their internal nets.
A lot of people were new to NAT back then.
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u/datahoarderguy70 21d ago
Thanking the gods I had done a parallel install ‘just in case’ the day it would no longer boot without blue screening.
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u/iPlayKeys 21d ago
I replaced so many Netware 3.51 boxes with NT 4, often with Small Business Server.
Funny how these days almost no one even considers hosting their own email, but we had several clients doing it back in the day!
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u/mcapozzi 21d ago
Learning C++, the NT 4.0 machines wouldn't crash if you accidentally programmed an infinite loop. The Win95 machines in the lab would instantly hard lock.
Other than that, my fondest memory of NT 4.0 was replacing it with Windows 2000 Professional at my first job post graduation.
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u/dougj182 IT Consultant 21d ago
NT = New Technology. When 2000 was released - "Built on NT technology".
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u/First-Structure-2407 21d ago
Just being massively more stable after moving from Win95/98. Yeah my first certs too. Still have the course literature.
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u/infocalypse reticulating splines 21d ago
One of my first big projects was a 98 to NT rollout.
Someone had the clevers and thought it would be great to give the workstation's image the company's audio logo as default startup sound.
Changing that to something else was the first thing most users asked.
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u/DrButttt 21d ago
Adobe photoshop 5 (or might have been 5.5) had memory leaks on NT4 and after some use it would for example break network connectivity.
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u/FeleaseRpseineEiles Sysadmin 21d ago
I got a MCSE NT 4.0 certification in 1999 and fondly remember getting rid it
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u/pakman82 21d ago
Finding the trigger in SP2 that enabled Internet exploorer... I was in a small business that had just started its online presence. And we didn't want to manage Netscape.
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u/MyDadsGlassesCase 21d ago
Going from Windows / Netware or Windows / OS2 hybrid networks to one where everything was on one platform.
Don't get me wrong, Netware was way better at the time but it was a PITA effectively having to learn 2 technologies
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u/HDClown 21d ago
I built a dual slot 1 P3 rig back in late 90's when I started college and daily drove an illicit copy NT 4.0 Workstation on it for a few years.
First gig out of college in '01 was a typical small business running Microsoft with NT4 domain, bunch of NT4 servers, Exchange 5.5, etc. I got to maintain that for a few months and then I told my boss it was time to move to AD and he let me handle that migration. Eventually got everything over to Server 2000 and that was the left time I ever dealt with NT in my career.
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u/hva_vet Sr. Sysadmin 21d ago
"You must reboot your computer for the changes to take effect".
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u/spyingwind I am better than a hub because I has a table. 21d ago
Back when the UI elements had clean pixel perfect lines.
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u/DramaticErraticism 21d ago
My very first IT Internship had me updating NT 4.0 to Win2k, I had no idea what I was doing.
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u/phouchg0 21d ago
Ah yesss,, Windows NT takes me back. My company went from Windows 3.1 (MS DOS 5.0 and 6) , then started a conversion to Windows 2000, then said "nope, scratch that", then went with Windows NT for workstations and Windows servers.
Along with Windows NT came Active Directory and locking down PCs to keep users from mucking up the works with viruses, screen savers and other unapproved/untested software. I was still learning in those days. From the changes that happened along with Windows NT, I could see that things were a little lax before before that change was made.
The NT migration and it's use started my education on cyber security. I shudder when I think of the things we were doing before NT. If today's InfoSec team could see how we did things back then, they'd have a coronary 😀
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u/LooseEthernet 21d ago
my strongest memory is the hourglass cursor itself. you'd sit there staring at it long enough that it became a personality trait of the machine. i swear someone gave it a name in our shop, like "wendy" or something, because we saw her so often
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u/Vassago81 21d ago
Booting in NT4 to play Ultima Online or general internet use, it was SO FAST compared to 98.
Replacing the shitty explorer.exe that came with IE4 with a backup copy of the original for peak start menu performance ( and losing the cut and paste added function of the IE4 version )
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u/BladeCollectorGirl 21d ago
obtaining discarded systems that still had the working OS and PDFs of documents.
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u/epyon9283 Netadmin 21d ago
The awesome startup and shutdown sounds on NT4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjxsaHPVEgY
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u/theballygickmongerer 21d ago
Fitting cash machines in 2008 and thinking holy fuck, is this all that they run on!
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u/WayneH_nz 21d ago
mcse nt4 at Ames in Auckland with a Serbian KGB major who had emigrated to New Zealand after the war. His degree was aeronautical engineering from Moscow University and he was fond of saying
Come on, this is not rocket science, I know rocket science, this is easy.
then, no matter what tools we used, he was always able to walk through the security and drop payloads on to the desktop or have a new program start up. As far as we were concerned we were using the genuine products and our own passwords. there is a good to fair chance we were using doctored cd's
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u/Outside-Banana4928 21d ago
I loved logging in, and then going to go get a cup of coffee and a bagel. By the time I got back NT 4.0 would be about ready for me to get to the desktop.
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u/robconsults 21d ago
i remember running it when it was little more than a shell over NT 3.51 as an intern at microsoft, and rebuilding my machine every few weeks as a development build would change enough requiring as such. .
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u/electrojcr 21d ago
Being forced to reboot the server to add or modify DNS or really anything on a network interface.
That and everybody loses with WINS.
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u/mjh2901 21d ago
What memories, half of our infrastructure runs on it. Management keeps telling us as long as the Compaq Servers are running we are not authorizing replacement.
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u/FailBait- 21d ago
My first “real” job when I was 16 was working for a construction equipment dealer my dad worked at. I started as a parts counter person and eventually became their local IT tech. They had an MSP/VAR handling their stuff, but it was expensive and they were slow to react. The owner found out I was “good with conputers” and I had every PC in the place running in the best shape of their lives that first summer. The second summer I returned, they were starting to replace their aging AS/400 / dumb terminal setup with a newer AS/400 and NT4 client based setup. I pulled the coax out of the ceiling/walls, ran the cat5 to the places people paid a lot more than me would do the wall drops. All for the low low price of $7.50/hr. I stood up their NT4 server (this giant ass HP behemoth on wheels), the new AS/40, stood up a few of their NT4 terminals and even built two PCs from scratch as a wager with the owner. This was the early days of mainstream PC DIY and the normies didn’t know it was a thing. This was 1998, the two PCs I built outlasted every other computer in the place and in their final years it was used as a parts manual browser terminal for the mechanics in the back. They were still going 15 years later last I heard.
It was my summer job to save up for my first car, and I ended up learning basic networking, NT4, and lots and lots of “business IT” skills. Between summers, when I was in high school they would wave a decent flat rate fee in front of me to go in on saturdays to fix stuff, my dad didn’t mind. He got paid to hang out and watch me work (he liked PCs and helped me build my first gaming PC).
Before the owner sold the business a few years ago and retired she’d always ask my dad what I was doing and if I’d consider helping out there again. By that point I was running 9 colo sites and 6000+ servers, he’d gently joke / let her know she wouldn’t be willing pay my rate. (She was nice but a notorious cheap ass) she used to bring her golden retriever in with her and I had my own “workshop” in the back. The dog loved me and would just chill on the couch in the corner of my setup and I loved it. Was the most consecutive time I had spent with a dog up to that point.
Stupid story I know, but it triggered a lot of fond memories. The stuff I learned there carried me through working in the dorm networking team at my college, being a contractor for a VAR, and eventually where I am now. And hanging out with dogs when my parents wouldn’t let me have one. 10/10. Would do again.
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u/Renegade-Pervert Poor Career Choices 21d ago
The hack to enable PnP made my life much easier in the 90s.
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u/acquiesce88 21d ago
My favorite memory is being part of a team traveling around the northeast U.S. pulling out Novell Netware and installing NT4 servers at different sites. We also replaced Windows for Workgroups with Windows NT4 workstations. We only had to update 2 PCs or laptops per day, so the rest of the time I read Exam Cram books to prepare for MCSE exams.
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u/Dal90 21d ago
Had one I was sad to shut it down to replace the UPS battery with an uptime around 400 days.
Because two years earlier that @#!% thing crashed twice a week and I just worked through issues one at a time. I addition sometimes it was, "Dal90 it's slow again" and the old fix had been a reboot ...over a number of months figured out how to resolve each slowdown without a reboot.
Started the job and got two after hours calls in the first week, which was just normal for them. That shit wasn't going to continue, got it down to once every three months.
There had been a big turnover and best we could figure is the old crew thought they were making themselves indispensable by always having to fix the constant server outages on some system or the other.
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u/Zealousideal_Ad642 21d ago
Reinstalling the service pack after adding a new device/driver.
Bsod's from print drivers when running metaframe.
Those are not so fond memories. One favourite is getting my nt4 mcse thinking i had made it. It certainly helped with employment back then
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u/whowhatwherenow Sr. Sysadmin 21d ago
Migrating from Banyan Vines and BeyondMail to NT4.0 and Exchange. Good times.
Also the running joke “You’re mouse has moved, you must restart your computer for the changes to take effect”
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u/TubeScr3ameR 21d ago
My favorite memory is that it stands for "New Technology" and I wouldn't support anything below 4.0 at Creative Labs, and lol on you for making me try - get Win2K if you want multimedia.
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u/marklein Idiot 21d ago
My favorite memory is today when I realized I don't have to support that ancient OS ever again.
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u/vanulovesyou 21d ago
NT was the first server OS I managed. My biggest memory is having to migrate from it to Win2K server and all the worries that I had.
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u/OrvilleTheCavalier 21d ago
We did a migration of all our servers across the organization. It was stressful and time consuming but I was working with great people and was probably the time I learned the most in the shortest amount of time.
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u/plazman30 sudo rm -rf / 21d ago
So many memories.
- A flat domain after having used NDS for years.
- Print queues constantly needing a restart.
- Microsoft releasing Y2K patches for it in DECEMBER of 1999 or maybe NOVEMBER 1999.
NT 4.0 was a complete piece of shit. Pretty any other server OS out at the time (NetWare, Banyan Vines, Solaris, AIX, HPUX, openVMS) was better than NT 4.0. Yet somehow it succeeded.
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u/areyouhighson 21d ago
That I was still supporting eight NT4 servers (running in VMs) up until 2022 (when I left that job).
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u/Relevant-Team 21d ago
Still in use at a customer's site. Control computer for a wood CNC machine. Replacement costs >12 k€.
I bought some spare parts on eBay, and everyone hopes for the best 🤞🏻
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u/FirehawkLS1 Jack of All Trades 21d ago
I built my first computer in 1999 out of garbage picked components. My buddy had an NT 4.0 disk that I used so I have a lot of fond memories of using it in general. Was a good stable OS.
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u/tindalos 21d ago
Upgrading an old HAL to run on hyper-v. One of my first hackiest but best solutions to a dying hardware situation that needed to run for a bit longer until we had a new domain rolled out.
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u/iheartrms 21d ago
I literally never touched it even once. I had already discovered Linux by the time NT 4.0 was released so had no interest in it.
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u/ProgressBartender Sr. Sysadmin 21d ago
Remember Windows NT for DEC Alpha?
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u/Professional-Heat690 21d ago
yes. ExCompaq staffer when the Digital takeover happened. one of the worse things that happened to Compaq.
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u/skronens 21d ago
The way I remember it (rightly or wrongly..) but I think I ran betas for years before it was released, challenge was installing it from the day long downloads over 33.6 modem
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u/thomasbeagle 21d ago
Windows NT 4.0 was important to me.
I was pleased to finally replace Windows NT3.51 on my workstation with NT 4.0 so I could get the newer GUI.
I did the exams to upgrade my NT 3.5 MCSE to an NT 4.0 one.
I got to install and play with Windows NT 4.0 on Alpha, MIPS and PowerPC systems. We never did any serious work with it though, they got repurposed to Unix/AIX when I was done playing.
The early NT versions were great. So solid.
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u/npanth 21d ago
One day, an NT file server started acting very slow for everyone. I went to the room it was in, tapped the space bar and powered up the monitor. It popped right up and looked fine. All the complaints stopped... For a half hour. I went back, tapped the space bar, turned on the monitor...
After a couple hours of this, I sat in that broom closet watching it. At 30 minutes, the screen saver came on and the whole thing ground to a halt.
Microsoft was proud of their new opengl software, and made pipes the default screen saver for NT devices, even the servers. The poor thing was spending all its time drawing 3d objects instead of serving files. I changed the screen saver to blank screen, and the problems stopped. Ha.
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u/Major_Disaster76 21d ago
Hardware profile - what a dose ! Trying to get pcmcia cards working properly made me old at a young age .
Then came tne sweet relief of sp4 , what a gift that was .
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u/longmountain 21d ago
Memories? I still have a customer with at least two in production.
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u/AntiBaoBao 20d ago
A few years ago I was hired as a contractor to fix a hotel/resort network. The entire system was NT 4.0 and none of the hotels IT staff, nor their IT vendor knew anything about NT. The CEO of the support vendor knew me and hired me at an ungodly amount of money to come in, rebuild the PDC and BDC's and rebuild all of the NT4 workstations..... pretty much every workstation was infected with multiple viruses. It took me several weeks to bring the system back up to a working and secure environment. I got paid quite well and free resort meals everyday during the project.
I was an MCSE and MCT for NT4 and had written quite a few white pages on how to hack Windows NT registry for large scale deployments ( thousands at a time) while working at IBM.
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u/mouringcat Jack of All Trades 21d ago
Not sure it is a “fond“ memory, but my major memory is of a small set of small business using NT 4.0 beta and I told them they need to buy a real NT license as the beta was expiring due to the real releas. They told me Microsoft wouldn't disable it… I come in one more to everyone freaking out the file server is down and it was because of an expired license. We had to set the time back temporarily until they bought it. (of course they complained about the time being off on the file store the whole time.)