was the fourth release of
Microsoft 's
Windows NT operating system, released in
1996 . It is a
32-bit Windows system available in workstation and server versions with a graphical environment similar to
Windows 95 . The "NT" designation in the product's title initially stood for "New Technology" according to
Bill Gates , but no longer has any specific meaning.
While more stable than Windows 95, it is also less flexible from a desktop perspective. Much of the stability is gained by virtualising the hardware and having software applications access the system
API s rather than the hardware directly as was done in
DOS and continued with Windows 95 and on. The trade-off is that writing to the APIs rather than to the hardware directly requires much more work be done by the computer and so hardware intensive applications such as games run much more slowly. While many programs written for the
Win32 API will run on both Windows 95 and Windows NT, despite support for
DirectX , the majority of 3D games will not.
The dichotomy between the NT and "9x" lines of Windows arguably only ended with the arrival of
Windows XP , by which time the gaming APIs—such as
OpenGL and
DirectX —had matured sufficiently to be more efficient to write for than common PC hardware and the hardware itself had become powerful enough to handle the API processing overhead acceptably.
Windows NT 4.0 was rendered "obsolete" with the advent of
Windows 2000 but is still (
As Of 2005 ) in widespread use despite Microsoft's many efforts to persuade customers to upgrade to more recent versions.
Most noticeable was that the workstation and server editions of Windows NT 4.0 had gained the user interface of
Windows 95 . The server editions of Windows NT 4.0 also had a built in
Web Server ,
IIS 2.0 . It also natively supported plugins and extensions of
Microsoft FrontPage , a
Web Site creation and management application. Other important features also were ''
Microsoft Transaction Server '' for network applications, and
Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ), which improved communication.
One change from previous versions of Windows NT was that the . This can be argued that stability was sacrificed for speed, as the original Windows NT kernel was designed with a
Microkernel in mind.
Microsoft released Windows NT 4.0
Service Pack s primarily to fix problems (
Bugs ). Windows NT 4.0, during the product's lifecycle, had several service packs, as well as numerous service rollup packages and option packs. The last full service pack was Service Pack 6a (SP6a).
A SP7 was planned at one stage in early 2001, but this became the ''Post SP6a Security Rollup'' and not a full Service Pack.
The service packs and an option pack were also released to add features. These included newer versions of
Internet Information Services , versions 3.0, and 4.0, support for
Active Server Pages , public-key and certificate authority functionality, smart card support, improved symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) scalability, clustering capabilities, and component object model (COM) support, among others.
- , released in 1996 , was designed for small-scale business server systems.
- , released in 1997 is the precursor to the '''Enterprise''' line of the Windows server family. Enterprise Server was designed for high-demand, high-traffic networks.
- , released in 1998 , allows the users to log on remotely. The same functionality was called '' Terminal Services '' in Windows 2000 , and ''Remote Desktop'' in Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 .
Windows NT 4.0 Server was included in versions 4.0 and 4.5 of
BackOffice Small Business Server suite.
- was designed for use as the general business desktop OS. Boasting a pure 32-Bit environment, with excellent stability, it quickly became a success for its intended market.
- was designed for special function devices like an ATM or Kiosk .
There is no fix for the
MS03-010 security issue on Windows NT 4.0 because Microsoft claims that "Due to these fundamental differences between Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 and its successors, it is infeasible to rebuild the software for Windows NT 4.0 to eliminate the vulnerability. To do so would require rearchitecting a very significant amount of the Windows NT 4.0 operating system, and not just the RPC component affected. The product of such a rearchitecture effort would be sufficiently incompatible with Windows NT 4.0 that there would be no assurance that applications designed to run on Windows NT 4.0 would continue to operate on the patched system."
Instead, Microsoft suggested Windows NT 4.0 users to protect the NT 4.0 system with a firewall that blocks Port 135.
