David Thompson, Corporate Vice President of the Windows Server Product Group at Microsoft, joined the company in 1990 and led an advanced development group in the company's LAN Manager for OS/2 project before joining the Windows NT team later that year. There, Thompson guided the development of NT's networking subsystem, ensuring that the product would work not just with Microsoft products but with the outside world.
Mark Lucovsky, Distinguished Engineer and Windows Server Architect at Microsoft, joined the company with the original wave of former Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) employees that accompanied NT architect Dave Cutler in 1988. Lucovsky is widely hailed for his technical acumen and his early efforts to change NT from an OS/2-based system to one that ran 32-bit Windows applications.
As the buzz about Windows Server 2003 heated up, I had a chance to talk with Thompson and Lucovsky about where it all began: NT. The two provided insight into the origins of the Windows architecture and its development process. (For additional comments from Thompson and Lucovsky, see "Windows Server 2003: The Road To Gold" at http://www.winsupersite.com/article/reviews/windows-server-2003-the-road-to-gold-part-one-the-early-years.aspx.)
Paul Thurrott (PT): What were NT's earliest days like?
Mark Lucovsky (ML): We came together as a group in November 1988. The first thing we did was get development machines. We bought top-of-the-line 386/25s with 110MB hard disks and 13MB of RAM. They were ungodly expensive. [Laughs] Then, we started writing the design documentation in [Microsoft] Word. Finally, after 2 weeks, it was time to start writing some code. Originally, we were targeting NT for the Intel i860, a RISC processor that was horribly behind schedule. Because we didn't have any i860 machines inhouse to test on, we used an i860 simulator (code-named N-Ten). That's why we called it NT, because it worked on the N-Ten. We checked the first code pieces in around mid-December 1988, and by January had a very basic system booting on the simulator.
PT: The i860 was pretty short-lived.
ML: Yeah, we ditched the i860 and went to the MIPS R3000 chip. Our architecture really paid off. We had designed NT to be portable, and we proved it would work almost immediately when we moved to MIPS. We made the change without a lot of pain. Then Microsoft added a bunch more guys to the project, and we started up the Intel i386 version. We stayed away from the 386 for a while to avoid getting sucked into the architecture.