Windows NT 4 went on sale 30 years ago today

Today marks the 30th anniversary of Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 becoming available on August 24, 1996.

Windows NT 4.0, codenamed “Tukwila,” went on retail sale exactly 30 years ago.

This was the version that started to deliver on the promise of Microsoft’s long-running Windows NT project.

NT 4 married the very solid NT operating system with a slightly modified version of the Windows Explorer desktop from Windows 95, which is why it was also internally known as the “Shell Update Release”.

NT 4 had been released to manufacturing on July 31.

As it happens, Windows 95 itself was launched exactly one year earlier, on August 24, 1995.

Codenamed “Chicago” and originally planned to be called “Windows 4”, Windows 95 went through a long, iterative development process during which the desktop shell changed dramatically.

Various unfinished versions leaked over the years, and the excellent ToastyTech has screenshot tours of Windows Chicago Build 58 and Build 73 in which you can see the UI taking shape.

In early versions, programs didn’t minimize to the taskbar yet, and the prototype Start Button didn’t do much.

By 31 years ago, the Explorer desktop had come together enough to launch.

Explorer had some missteps.

For instance, Windows 95 had no web browser; that was a paid-for optional extra in the Windows 95 Plus! Pack, along with Space Cadet Pinball.

Instead, Windows 95 had a desktop icon for the Microsoft Network (MSN), a dial-up social network that displayed forums and participant lists using desktop file-explorer style windows, in an effort to blur the lines between local and remote resources.

Some of the features of the Explorer desktop were to avoid stepping on Apple’s toes – it had already sued Digital Research over the quite Mac-like GEM Desktop.