Discovery of vintage Windows NT compilation from 1991 sheds light on early graphics capabilities

The oldest known compilation of the Windows NT system has been discovered. This file assembly, which might be one of the earliest versions capable of displaying graphics, was created on April 3, 1991. The form of early iterations of Windows has been a topic of speculation for many years.

These vintage files have been inserted into a disk repository by Jeff Parsons, the inventor of the emulator PCjs. The collection of three floppy disks provides a series of ZIP archives containing NT core files, minus an installer and a boot manager. The files were designed to be manually loaded onto a computer running another system. The set, named WOW Reversi MIPS Demo, was utilized to highlight the primary features of NT, its universal portability, and support for 32-bit architecture.

This file set displays an interesting suite of features. It maintains the predicted directory structure of the OS/2 system, but the files themselves comprise the basic NT system: NTOSKRNL, CSRSS, and SMSS are included (although, the LSA subsystem supporting securities is absent). Only one hardware abstraction layer is present: handling the Jazz computer, a reference engineering station based on the MIPS R4000 processor. The MIPS version's creation aimed at maintaining discipline in writing portable systems, despite ultimate plans for a version compatible with the i386 processor. The functional implementation was anticipated to be easily transferable.

"WOW" is short for "Windows on Windows". When coupled with Windows NT on Intel, it operates as the SoftPC/NTVDM mechanism, initiating a 16-bit environment in a window. This setting enables running 32-bit applications. To put it simply, it's an emulation mechanism for "everything except the processor". However, the situation becomes more complex with other architectures.

The role of "WOW" in the MIPS environment differs mainly due to an absence of the SoftPC solution in 1991. The MIPS NT employed an x86 architecture emulator (written by Parsons for demonstration purposes). This emulator boots the beta version of the MS-DOS 5.0 system, and then initiates an early, previously unknown beta of the Windows 3.1 environment and finally launches the game Reversi. This process was supposed to illustrate how classic Windows applications would run on different processor architectures.

The uncovered system introduces itself as "32-bit Windows" or "Windows 4.0", replacing most references to "NT OS/2". This naming choice implies that plans for fully transitioning Windows to NT were in motion not in 1998, but as early as 1992. However, we had to wait an additional decade for this to happen. Although the NT from April 1991 on MIPS was capable of running Intel's 16-bit Windows programs, it shared a common issue with advanced systems: it was "almost ready". Many aspects functioned "in most cases" or "typically", and despite being an undeniable engineering feat, it wasn't sufficient for customer satisfaction.

The 370-kilobyte x86 emulator for MIPS is proof of the substantial talent comprising the NT project team. However, market realities led to the system remaining "almost ready" for an extra two years.