{"slug": "windows-nt", "name": "Windows NT", "category": "os", "category_name": "Operating systems and desktop", "description": "", "recommenders": 9, "commenters": 22, "warners": 4, "score": 6.499, "rising": -1.62, "first": "2025-11-23", "latest": "2026-10-28", "why": "realised what a huge jump it was compared to the dOS/Windows 3.x/Windows 9x lineage", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 9, "neutral": 6, "compare": 3, "warn": 4}, "spark": [1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 3, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "realised what a huge jump it was compared to the dOS/Windows 3.x/Windows 9x lineage", "kind": "", "icon": true, "domain": null, "github_repo": "github.com/wack0/entii-for-workcubes", "official_url": "https://github.com/wack0/entii-for-workcubes", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["Windows NT", "Windows NT 4.0"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 804126240, "item_id": 50257890, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50257890", "by": "qubex", "date": "2026-10-27", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "realised what a huge jump it was compared to the dOS/Windows 3.x/Windows 9x lineage", "excerpt": "I first encountered NT 4.0 at age fifteen in 1996 and realised what a huge jump it was compared to the dOS/Windows 3.x/Windows 9x lineage. I went on to use it for the rest of the nineties and I was a beta tester for NT 5.0 (which later became Windows 2000). I jumped ship in 2003 and switched to MacOS X before XP SP2 was released. I feel a strange sense of familiarity but also alienation whenever I have to use a Windo", "context": "NT 5.0 beta tester, used NT through the nineties", "use_case": "desktop operating system", "switched_from": "", "story": "LiberNT - A free NT operating system"}, {"id": 773761472, "item_id": 48360092, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48360092", "by": "wahern", "date": "2026-06-01", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "NT had all the necessary facilities in the kernel", "excerpt": "NtCreateUserProcess supports copy-on-write fork semantics without overcommit. See https://github.com/huntandhackett/process-cloning#cloning-for-memory-dumping And there's a wrapper, RtlCloneUserProcess, that is called using the same traditional fork pattern. Precise memory accounting and CoW fork aren't intrinsically antagonistic, and the general ability to clone CoW mappings or similar kernel structures is useful be", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Re: [PATCH] OOM_pardon, a.k.a. don't kill my xlock (2004)"}, {"id": 770177248, "item_id": 48136078, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48136078", "by": "ConceptJunkie", "date": "2026-05-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "switched to NT and never looked back", "excerpt": "I used Windows 95 for a few months and switched to NT and never looked back. I did later run Windows 98 on my kids' machine for games, but I never tried, or wanted to try Windows ME. Windows 2000 has the best look and feel for the GUI, but I do recall that I usually saw my first Explorer crash within an hour of a fresh install. Windows 7 was peak Windows because you could still get the \"Classic\" Windows 2000 theme, b", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "Windows 95", "story": "Classic 7 is a Windows 10 LTSC mod to look 1:1 to Windows 7"}, {"id": 766363792, "item_id": 47897737, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47897737", "by": "jasomill", "date": "2026-04-24", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I don't recall the GUI ever actually hanging or crashing", "excerpt": "And I don't recall any practical way to recover from a crashed NT 3.x GUI subsystem. It would presumably still function as a server, and be gracefully shut down remotely, but in the absence of anything like Remote Desktop or EMS[1], you'd be hard pressed to get much local troubleshooting done without rebooting the system anyway. Also, as an NT user since 3.1, and a daily user of 3.5 and 3.51, I don't recall the GUI e", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Linux 7.1 Removes Drivers for Bus Mouse Support"}, {"id": 763252512, "item_id": 47703282, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47703282", "by": "fortran77", "date": "2026-04-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Much easier to do, because of the superior, more modern architecture of Windows NT.", "excerpt": "There was a Windows NT 4.0 for PowerPC. And several people have had this running on the Wii. https://github.com/Wack0/entii-for-workcubes Much easier to do, because of the superior, more modern architecture of Windows NT. (It's not based on Apollo-era OS like OSX is.)", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "I Ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 791047234, "item_id": 49440452, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49440452", "by": "mananaysiempre", "date": "2026-08-25", "stance": "warn", "quote": "was NT too heavy to run on contemporary consumer machines", "excerpt": "It\u2019s not correct to say it was \u201creally 16-bit\u201d, no, but as Unauthorized Windows 95[1] eloquently demonstrates, neither was Windows 3.1 or 3.11, especially with Win32s, and Windows 95 was much more of a direct descendant of that environment that the marketing implied. And on a more personal note, reading the descriptions of the mixed 16/32-bit architecture always makes me feel conflicted. On one hand, the technical ac", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Windows 95 released August 24, 1995"}, {"id": 778331089, "item_id": 48645693, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48645693", "by": "PaulHoule", "date": "2026-06-23", "stance": "warn", "quote": "NT not much better despite the fanbois saying otherwise", "excerpt": "When I was in grad school I worked in a corner which had a mac on one side and an IBM POWER system with a huge screen on the other side. Early on the mac was crashing all the time when I was browsing the net, at some point in the 8-9 era they added a bunch of locks to stop the crashes and then it was beachball city all the time. My understanding was that classic was built on the assumption that events come in from th", "context": "grad student", "use_case": "lab workstations", "switched_from": "", "story": "Apple Is Going to Raise Device Prices \u2013 But When?"}, {"id": 770006162, "item_id": 48125385, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48125385", "by": "dleslie", "date": "2026-05-13", "stance": "warn", "quote": "NT was slow", "excerpt": "Be made inroads in radio and sound production; though I don't think they knew it.[0] There was a market starved for a stable, high quality and responsive operating system that would run on the x86 hardware that was abundant everywhere. Windows wasn't it, yet; recall this is years before XP, and Windows 98 was an unstable mess while NT was slow. 0: https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/27-tune_tracker/", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Haiku"}, {"id": 743044528, "item_id": 46440283, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46440283", "by": "mrpippy", "date": "2025-12-30", "stance": "warn", "quote": "The syscall numbers change with every release", "excerpt": "The syscall numbers change with every release: https://j00ru.vexillium.org/syscalls/nt/64/", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Win32 is the stable Linux ABI"}]}], "who": [{"by": "qubex", "context": "NT 5.0 beta tester, used NT through the nineties", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50257890", "date": "2026-10-27"}], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["desktop operating system", "lab workstations", "os kernel design", "multitasking on retro pc"], "compared": [{"slug": "linux", "name": "Linux", "co": 6, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "windows-9x", "name": "Windows 9x", "co": 4, "switched_from": 1, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "macos", "name": "macOS", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "windows-2000", "name": "Windows 2000", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47691730", "title": "I Ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50267569", "title": "Moxnox 1.0: NT-Like, POSIX-Compatible OS Running Atop Btrfs", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50243914", "title": "LiberNT - A free NT operating system", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49430007", "title": "Windows 95 released August 24, 1995", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49305492", "title": "RISC-V: They Should Have Known Better", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49189234", "title": "Nvidia's Vera Whitepaper Has a Thread Loose", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {"recommend": 1}, "2025-12": {"compare": 2, "warn": 1}, "2026-01": {"neutral": 1, "recommend": 1}, "2026-02": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-03": {}, "2026-04": {"recommend": 3, "neutral": 1}, "2026-05": {"warn": 1, "recommend": 1}, "2026-06": {"recommend": 1, "neutral": 1, "warn": 1}, "2026-07": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-08": {"neutral": 1, "compare": 1, "warn": 1}, "2026-09": {}, "2026-10": {"recommend": 1, "neutral": 1}}, "quotes": [{"id": 804425872, "item_id": 50276617, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50276617", "by": "trentnelson", "date": "2026-10-28", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "", "excerpt": "Great article\u2026 but no mention of one of NT\u2019s best features: completion ports! It ties together all the best features of the NT kernel and makes writing performant multi-threaded I/O applications (especially socket servers) a delight. The thread pool APIs introduced in Vista (which use completion ports under the hood) were also a sublime addition. https://pyparallel.org was possible to hack into existence over the cou", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Moxnox 1.0: NT-Like, POSIX-Compatible OS Running Atop Btrfs"}, {"id": 804126240, "item_id": 50257890, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50257890", "by": "qubex", "date": "2026-10-27", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "realised what a huge jump it was compared to the dOS/Windows 3.x/Windows 9x lineage", "excerpt": "I first encountered NT 4.0 at age fifteen in 1996 and realised what a huge jump it was compared to the dOS/Windows 3.x/Windows 9x lineage. I went on to use it for the rest of the nineties and I was a beta tester for NT 5.0 (which later became Windows 2000). I jumped ship in 2003 and switched to MacOS X before XP SP2 was released. I feel a strange sense of familiarity but also alienation whenever I have to use a Windo", "context": "NT 5.0 beta tester, used NT through the nineties", "use_case": "desktop operating system", "switched_from": "", "story": "LiberNT - A free NT operating system"}, {"id": 791047234, "item_id": 49440452, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49440452", "by": "mananaysiempre", "date": "2026-08-25", "stance": "warn", "quote": "was NT too heavy to run on contemporary consumer machines", "excerpt": "It\u2019s not correct to say it was \u201creally 16-bit\u201d, no, but as Unauthorized Windows 95[1] eloquently demonstrates, neither was Windows 3.1 or 3.11, especially with Win32s, and Windows 95 was much more of a direct descendant of that environment that the marketing implied. And on a more personal note, reading the descriptions of the mixed 16/32-bit architecture always makes me feel conflicted. On one hand, the technical ac", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Windows 95 released August 24, 1995"}, {"id": 788919377, "item_id": 49307461, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49307461", "by": "monocasa", "date": "2026-08-14", "stance": "compare", "quote": "Linux started about three years after NT did", "excerpt": "> You do realize that Linux got basic SMP support 3 years after NT? Linux started about three years after NT did. And NT could only support 64 processors for a long time when Linux could support thousands. > It still does not have reliable sleep-wake. Neither does NT really. Both depend on ACPI for the systems you're talking about, and it's the platform interface that's ultimately fucked. > And it only added native a", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "RISC-V: They Should Have Known Better"}, {"id": 787172208, "item_id": 49198263, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49198263", "by": "kjs3", "date": "2026-08-06", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "PowerPC was an officially supported and shipping Windows NT 3.51 & 4 target", "excerpt": "Um...while not \"OG Windows\" I guess, PowerPC was an officially supported and shipping Windows NT 3.51 & 4 target[1]. It was released a couple of years before XP 64-bit for itanic. SPARC was a planned NT port, and while it never happened, it could have[2][3]. [1] https://archive.org/details/NT351PMZPPC [2] https://www.techmonitor.ai/technology/undercurrent_bubbling_at_sun_to_get_windows_nt_implemented_for_the_sparc [3", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Nvidia's Vera Whitepaper Has a Thread Loose"}, {"id": 780776992, "item_id": 48798562, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48798562", "by": "sillywalk", "date": "2026-07-05", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "all of the released versions of NT on Alpha were 32 bit", "excerpt": "As a side-note, it's interesting that all of the released versions of NT on Alpha were 32 bit. Raymond Chen has a blog post[0] about using Alpha to develop 64bit Windows before Itanium hardware was available. Virtually Fun has some more excellent background on finding a compiler for 64bit Windows[1], finding a copy of Windows 2000 64bit for Alpha AXP[2], and a detailed article about making an ISO from the found copy.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Run Windows 2000 on a DEC Alpha with a new es40 fork"}, {"id": 778331089, "item_id": 48645693, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48645693", "by": "PaulHoule", "date": "2026-06-23", "stance": "warn", "quote": "NT not much better despite the fanbois saying otherwise", "excerpt": "When I was in grad school I worked in a corner which had a mac on one side and an IBM POWER system with a huge screen on the other side. Early on the mac was crashing all the time when I was browsing the net, at some point in the 8-9 era they added a bunch of locks to stop the crashes and then it was beachball city all the time. My understanding was that classic was built on the assumption that events come in from th", "context": "grad student", "use_case": "lab workstations", "switched_from": "", "story": "Apple Is Going to Raise Device Prices \u2013 But When?"}, {"id": 774099392, "item_id": 48381212, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48381212", "by": "hnlmorg", "date": "2026-06-03", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "NT uses an object system for filesystem objects", "excerpt": "> Really not possible as most of POSIX semantics arise naturally from the kernel (or are enforced/executed at the kernel level). The kernels undoubtedly take different approaches. But there's nothing in NT that strictly prohibits POSIX compatibility layers. As we see with the many compatibility layers that have existed for Windows over the years. > For instance the idea that \"everything is a file\" POSIX doesn't have ", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Coreutils for Windows"}, {"id": 773761472, "item_id": 48360092, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48360092", "by": "wahern", "date": "2026-06-01", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "NT had all the necessary facilities in the kernel", "excerpt": "NtCreateUserProcess supports copy-on-write fork semantics without overcommit. See https://github.com/huntandhackett/process-cloning#cloning-for-memory-dumping And there's a wrapper, RtlCloneUserProcess, that is called using the same traditional fork pattern. Precise memory accounting and CoW fork aren't intrinsically antagonistic, and the general ability to clone CoW mappings or similar kernel structures is useful be", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Re: [PATCH] OOM_pardon, a.k.a. don't kill my xlock (2004)"}, {"id": 770177248, "item_id": 48136078, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48136078", "by": "ConceptJunkie", "date": "2026-05-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "switched to NT and never looked back", "excerpt": "I used Windows 95 for a few months and switched to NT and never looked back. I did later run Windows 98 on my kids' machine for games, but I never tried, or wanted to try Windows ME. Windows 2000 has the best look and feel for the GUI, but I do recall that I usually saw my first Explorer crash within an hour of a fresh install. Windows 7 was peak Windows because you could still get the \"Classic\" Windows 2000 theme, b", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "Windows 95", "story": "Classic 7 is a Windows 10 LTSC mod to look 1:1 to Windows 7"}, {"id": 770006162, "item_id": 48125385, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48125385", "by": "dleslie", "date": "2026-05-13", "stance": "warn", "quote": "NT was slow", "excerpt": "Be made inroads in radio and sound production; though I don't think they knew it.[0] There was a market starved for a stable, high quality and responsive operating system that would run on the x86 hardware that was abundant everywhere. Windows wasn't it, yet; recall this is years before XP, and Windows 98 was an unstable mess while NT was slow. 0: https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/27-tune_tracker/", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Haiku"}, {"id": 766363792, "item_id": 47897737, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47897737", "by": "jasomill", "date": "2026-04-24", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I don't recall the GUI ever actually hanging or crashing", "excerpt": "And I don't recall any practical way to recover from a crashed NT 3.x GUI subsystem. It would presumably still function as a server, and be gracefully shut down remotely, but in the absence of anything like Remote Desktop or EMS[1], you'd be hard pressed to get much local troubleshooting done without rebooting the system anyway. Also, as an NT user since 3.1, and a daily user of 3.5 and 3.51, I don't recall the GUI e", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Linux 7.1 Removes Drivers for Bus Mouse Support"}, {"id": 763252512, "item_id": 47703282, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47703282", "by": "fortran77", "date": "2026-04-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Much easier to do, because of the superior, more modern architecture of Windows NT.", "excerpt": "There was a Windows NT 4.0 for PowerPC. And several people have had this running on the Wii. https://github.com/Wack0/entii-for-workcubes Much easier to do, because of the superior, more modern architecture of Windows NT. (It's not based on Apollo-era OS like OSX is.)", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "I Ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii"}, {"id": 763075344, "item_id": 47692209, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47692209", "by": "nticompass", "date": "2026-04-08", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "There was a PPC version of Windows NT", "excerpt": "There was a PPC version of Windows NT, and yes someone put it on the Wii! https://github.com/Wack0/entii-for-workcubes See also: https://gbatemp.net/threads/windows-nt-ported-to-wii.667959/", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "I Ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii"}, {"id": 761832816, "item_id": 47614551, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47614551", "by": "aleph_minus_one", "date": "2026-04-02", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "The ideas behind the NT kernels are much deeper than what many Linux fans think of it", "excerpt": "> Is there value in having a \"working ReactOS\" as of 2026 _for workstations_? The ideas behind the NT kernels are much deeper than what many Linux fans think of it. Just to give some examples: - the NT kernel is build around supporting multiple subsystems, even though currently only \"1.5\" are in active use: the Windows subsystem and WSL1 (the latter has for many purposes been replaced by WSL2) - the NT kernel is not ", "context": "", "use_case": "OS kernel design", "switched_from": "", "story": "ReactOS Shows Improved Stability and 64-Bit Support at Chemnitz Linux Days 2026"}, {"id": 752305104, "item_id": 47019069, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47019069", "by": "Lammy", "date": "2026-02-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "My favorite part of NT is the Local Procedure Call", "excerpt": "My favorite part of NT is the Local Procedure Call (now obsoleted by ALPC): https://computernewb.com/~lily/files/Documents/NTDesignWorkbook/lpc.pdf Very cool to be able to read the original design instead of just reverse-engineered ones. Thanks for posting!", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Windows NT/OS2 Design Workbook"}, {"id": 747375219, "item_id": 46710951, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46710951", "by": "dijit", "date": "2026-01-21", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "NT was just so good", "excerpt": "Absolutely not. ME was unstable but had charm, it deserved a lot of the dislike because NT was just so good... and they really should not have removed Real-Mode; that would have been the reason to use ME over NT2000... Vista though? If you genuinely gave me a patched Vista and said that it was a viable alternative to 11... I would 100% take that 10/10 times. Vista's problem was that it was heavy and people sold devic", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Hate is a strong word, but I don't like Windows 11"}, {"id": 746831011, "item_id": 46676938, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46676938", "by": "pjmlp", "date": "2026-01-19", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "shipping software on Aix, HP-UX, Solaris and Windows NT/2000", "excerpt": "We on the other hand were shipping software on Aix, HP-UX, Solaris and Windows NT/2000. As MSFT partner, we also started our voyage to port the GUI frontends into the newly introduced .NET. We used Red-Hat Linux internally for our CVS server, MP3 music shares and Quake lan parties. That is how seriously we look at Linux in 2002.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "The Cathedral, the Megachurch, and the Bazaar"}, {"id": 743044528, "item_id": 46440283, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46440283", "by": "mrpippy", "date": "2025-12-30", "stance": "warn", "quote": "The syscall numbers change with every release", "excerpt": "The syscall numbers change with every release: https://j00ru.vexillium.org/syscalls/nt/64/", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Win32 is the stable Linux ABI"}, {"id": 741813904, "item_id": 46363369, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46363369", "by": "gucci-on-fleek", "date": "2025-12-23", "stance": "compare", "quote": "Windows NT has excellent technical foundations", "excerpt": "1. Because it's not open source. This isn't purely an ideological thing, but that I tend to run into obscure bugs, so being able to look through the source and submit a patch is incredibly useful to me. 2. Because what I want doesn't exist. Windows NT has excellent technical foundations, but I really don't like using Win32 or any of the Windows shell stuff, but there's no way for regular consumers to use Windows NT w", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Microsoft to replace all C/C++ code with Rust"}, {"id": 740620113, "item_id": 46288757, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46288757", "by": "lproven", "date": "2025-12-16", "stance": "compare", "quote": "I didn't care that NT was more solid", "excerpt": "Totally agreed regarding appearance etc. However, the one thing I'd take issue with: > As a programmer, I can point out all the many, many flaws with its technical architecture. I think, since we started out on history here, we must consider the history and its context. 1. Apple does the Lisa: a cheaper Xerox Alto, minus the networking and the programming language. Multitasking, hard disk based, new app paradign. The", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "In the Beginning was the Command Line (1999)"}, {"id": 736423600, "item_id": 46026475, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46026475", "by": "accrual", "date": "2025-11-23", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I could have a browser open, PuTTY, and some tracker music playing no problem.", "excerpt": "I did some multitasking recently on my iDX4-100 + 64MB FPM. I used NT4 with SP2 because the full SP6 was much slower. I could have a browser open, PuTTY, and some tracker music playing no problem. :)", "context": "", "use_case": "multitasking on retro PC", "switched_from": "", "story": "Unusual circuits in the Intel 386's standard cell logic"}]}