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Windows NT 3.5 vs 3.51

A

Andrew T.

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The early days of Windows NT have always been something of an enigma to me: Most of the world still ran on DOS at the time; none of the 3.x versions were very widely deployed, and NT 4.0 is the earliest version I've used myself.

How similar were the binary compatibility of Windows NT 3.5 and 3.51? Could software written for NT 3.51 also run on 3.5 more often than not?

How was the 3.51 update distributed? Was it distributed freely like a service pack, or was it sold in a box at a stiff price? Or neither of the above?

While digging through some floppy disks stashed in a university supply closet years ago, I found Disk 1 of NT 3.51 Server followed by Disks 2 through twenty-something of 3.5. That certainly seemed to imply that the two were interchangeable, but it's only circumstantial evidence.
 
Yes, usually. 3.51 was a relatively minor upgrade to 3.5.

I got my copies through MSDN and they were part of the library. AFAIK, before 2K, NT was not sold in the retail channel.
 
I remember 3.51 adding PCMCIA support which I was greatly welcoming at the time.

It was distributed as a release, not a service pack.
 
NT was sold retail. I remember seeing boxes for 4.0 on the shelf at computer stores. 3.51's big new feature was PowerPC support, but it also may have added in fixes to make it "current" with some system features that appeared in Windows 95.
 
There were boxed copies of NT3.51 and NT4 in retail as well as purchased on line. There were academic discounted copies as well.
 
I have boxed copies of 3.5.1 and 4.0 workstation (both with a couple boot floppies and CDROM). From what I recall NT 4.x was the version that companies started using quite a bit for servers (before that they used Novel Netware). I never seen NT 3.5.x used anywhere back in the day.
 
In my little corner of the government workplace, we used NT 4 well into 2002. The IT people wouldn't allow XP until they ran it through their security protocol and got some miles on it. If it wasn't for the fact that a percentage of our people were having problems with driver compatibility on the newer peripherals, like printers, scanners, and such, we would have continued to stay with NT 4. I always liked it - nice and solid.
 
I think NT4 Workstation and below allowed for 10 concurrent network connections. On W2k Workstation and above it was reduced to 5. Still more than enough for the average punter I guess.
 
As I recall, the big difference between NT 4 and 3.51 is that under 3.51, certain drivers were kept in user-space and NT 4 moved them into kernel space for reasons of speed. Somewhere (was it 2K?) kernel-mode drivers changed to include power management features. Before that, there wasn't much difference at the source level between 3.51 and 4.0 kernel-mode drivers. I recall that the power management features were introduced after RC1 had been distributed, which peeved me greatly--before that, the official word from Redmond was that you could use NT 4 kernel mode drivers without modification.

Good times...
 
Chuck(G) said:
Somewhere (was it 2K?) kernel-mode drivers changed to include power management features. Before that, there wasn't much difference at the source level between 3.51 and 4.0 kernel-mode drivers.
Good times...
Click to expand...

Full plug and play and power management support didn't show up in the NT code base until Windows 2000. The basics of that first shipped in the Windows 95 USB Supplement OSR 2.1. Those USB drivers were NT kernel style drivers with plug and play and power management support, not VxD style drivers, and those drivers eventually became the Windows 2000 versions. Of course the kernel driver plug and play and power management interface mutated a bit along the way between the first Windows 95 USB Supplement OSR 2.1 release, through Windows 98, and then Windows 2000.
 
Chuck(G) said:
Yes, usually. 3.51 was a relatively minor upgrade to 3.5.

I got my copies through MSDN and they were part of the library. AFAIK, before 2K, NT was not sold in the retail channel.
Click to expand...

NT Workstation 4.0 was the first version I saw retail and I remember liking the box and remembering the hype that while you couldn't game really on it, it was practically bullet proof of an operating system and I could somehow get a decent web browser to work on it again I might even still use that as a daily driver... :)
 
gslick said:
Full plug and play and power management support didn't show up in the NT code base until Windows 2000. The basics of that first shipped in the Windows 95 USB Supplement OSR 2.1. Those USB drivers were NT kernel style drivers with plug and play and power management support, not VxD style drivers, and those drivers eventually became the Windows 2000 versions. Of course the kernel driver plug and play and power management interface mutated a bit along the way between the first Windows 95 USB Supplement OSR 2.1 release, through Windows 98, and then Windows 2000.
Click to expand...

What I said. I still have W2K RC1--and it doesn't have the power management hooks. RC2 and RC3 do. I remember grumbling a lot.

I've used 2K "miniport" drivers on Win98SE with some degree of success. But NT kernel-mode drivers are a very different kettle of fish--not to mention having to remember absurdly long symbol names, such as "DevicePropertyPhysicalDeviceObjectName" or "IoCopyCurrentIrpStackLocationToNext" (and being "C", they are case-sensitive).

In a perverse sort of way, however, it was fun.
 
Chuck(G) said:
What I said. I still have W2K RC1--and it doesn't have the power management hooks. RC2 and RC3 do. I remember grumbling a lot.
Click to expand...

You probably meant Windows 2000 Beta 1 (September 1997), Beta 2 (August 1998), and Beta 3 (January 1999). RC1 and RC2 were later in 1999 after Beta 3. Large changes normally don't happen between Release Candidate builds and the RTM build.

I could see a lot plug and play and power management changes happening between 1997 and 1998, then somewhat fewer after Windows 98 was released and some of the decisions were finalized. A lot of battles were fought between different groups on the plug and play and power management design choices in the early days.
 
Don't recall--it might have been Beta 2 and RC1 or it may have been between RC1 and RC2. It was strange and directly contradicted the stuff that MS had published earlier in its developer's newsletter. I remember trying my NT4 driver on one of the releases and breathing a sigh of relief when it worked. Then, on e of the RCs came along and screwed things up.

I don't know how many people wrote special kernel-mode device drivers outside of MS back then, much less drivers that ran on their own thread. I may have been one of the unlucky ones. At any rate I remember muttering a few choice curses and scribbling a bunch of code.
 
lyonadmiral said:
NT Workstation 4.0 was the first version I saw retail and I remember liking the box and remembering the hype that while you couldn't game really on it, it was practically bullet proof of an operating system and I could somehow get a decent web browser to work on it again I might even still use that as a daily driver... :)
Click to expand...

Gaming took a little work. Someone, not me, figured out how to drop Space Cadet pinball into NT 4. IIRC, the trick was to manually put a certain dll file in the system32 directory. Still a pretty good game.
 
Gaming and NT didn't really happen until Win2k. I still used 2k after most people jumped to XP it was one of my favorite OS of all time.
 
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