Fun to read all of this NT history. I remember when I came to the IEEE Computer Society in 1994 they had Windows 3.11 and on their workstations and Novell servers/Sparc 10/20 systems.
Windows 3 was a nightmare to install properly, and getting a system that was *reliable* required a massive amount of custom ini files, weird drivers, and the like. It was a total mess: You can install it of course but getting it to run day after day without crashing was a serious balancing act.
We also had a strange donation: An NCR 3500 system which was a big cube box about 5 feet tall that held a lot of 1gb SCSI drives and *4* 486/50 CPUs with I think 32mb of memory. I played with this system, it ran NCR's brain dead System V Unix and was doing nothing (NCR gave it to us) so I tried loading NT 3.5 on it.
What an amazing OS! Unlike Windows it ran overnight, over the weekend, it just RAN. So we used it as a spare file server and to do things like CCMail mailbox compactions, where I could run several jobs at once on the 4 CPU system. Note it did have a special HAL that I had to install for the processors, and it had another one for its system plane and the MicroChannel bus.
When Windows 4.0 preview came out in 1995 I was blown away. It was solid, reliable, AND had the newer interface. I immediately flattened the 3500, loaded it up, and it worked perfectly. All 4 CPUs worked, all memory recognized, and we could now use the system to do stuff.
That "Stuff" came quickly. Anderson was still with UIUC and he had developed this thing called "Netscape Commerce Server" which had SHTTP and HTTPS ability. I took one look at that pre-release code, and we loaded it on the 3500 so we could put SuperComputing 95's registration up on the Web and ACCEPT CREDIT CARDS FOR REGISTRATION!
After getting that all ready I was writing the PERL code to handle the page submission and realized *I* would be the one who would have to type the damn cards into ICVerify. And I looked at the DOS version of that credit card processing software. And looked at the 3500 with its perfect DOS emulation and 2 serial ports. And back at the stone age ICVerify software....
And got to work building a queue interface so the web site could write the card to a temp file, and another PERL script would take the file and jam it into ICVerify, then read out the result and put it back into the queue for the Web server to acknowedge payment.
BANG! I created one of the first secure E-Commerce systems on the web. Complete with HTTPS:, a software based WAF (the queuing system did all the checks to make sure someone wasn't trying to hack in a refund) and OS controlled isolation of the ICVerify from the Web server.
The rest.... was history. We ran SuperComputing95, then other conferences and everyone LOVED it. Then we did $99 renewals online, and expanded the NCR to 256mb of memory. Then I re-wrote the IEEE CSLSP (Computer Society Library Subscription Program) which at the time came with the stupid IEEE LSP which consisted of a huge disk changer of 100 or so CD ROMs and a big clunky computer for colleges. We took the 10 CD's that had the Computer Society content, wrote an SGML-HTML converter, used DYNAWEB to convert Tek Math to GIFs (in real time) and had a system that could now serve the whole library system via the internet from our office to Colleges without a massive chunk of junky pioneer hardware...
This required the 3500 to get some.... disks.... But we had space in the box so we built several RAID arrays of 4.3gb SCSI disks and placed a massive order with NCR for their 3550 upgrade.
Which consisted of a SECOND Microchannel bus (which we split the disk controllers onto as the 3500 had incredible internal bandwidth), 256mb memory upgrade with L3 cache, and most importantly we replaced the 4 486/50 with a total of eight Pentium Pro/200 systems on 2 processor boards. Each board had two sets of 2 PPros with their level 1 cache and a separate 1mb L2 cache that went to one of the two memory lanes to the memory boards. Each MicroChannel likewise would connect to one of the two memory lanes. So we had 8 CPUs (later upgraded to 16) that allowed people to hit the web server, request an article, and one of the Pentium Pros would decode the SGML, another one or two would render the TEKMath into HTML in real time all in parallel. And since there were dual MCA's one could handle one periodical while another handled a different one at the same time.
As load increased I could watch the system bring more of the processors into bear and watch as the Microchannel busses balanced out the load. We kept Windows NT on that system all the way till I left in 2000, with 16 Pentium Pro CPUs (upgraded to the ODP 333mhz chips which did work as the system treated the Pentiums as pairs of CPUs) and it darn near never went down due to crashes.
I wonder what happened to that NCR3550. It was a helll of a workhorse and was the source of much of what we call E-Commerce and Digital Libraries......