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xx Historical Perspective
We originally thought we could produce the first Windows NT system in a little over two
years. It actually ended up taking us four and a half years for the first release in the summer of
1993, and that release supported the Intel i386, Intel i486, and the MIPS R4000 processors.
Six weeks later, we also introduced support for the Digital Alpha processors.
The first release of Windows NT was larger and slower than expected, so the next major push
was a project called Daytona, named after the speedway in Florida. The main goals for this
release were to reduce the size of the system, increase the speed of the system, and, of course,
to make it more reliable. Six months after the release of Windows NT 3.5 in the fall of 1994,
we released Windows NT 3.51, an updated version containing support for the IBM PowerPC
processor.
The goal for the next version of Windows NT was to update the user interface to be compati-
ble with Windows 95 and to incorporate the Cairo technologies that had been under develop-
ment at Microsoft for a couple of years. This system took two more years to develop and was
introduced in the summer of 1996 as Windows NT 4.0.
The following version of NT saw a name change to Windows 2000 and was the last system for
which the client and server systems were released at the same time. This version was built on
the same Windows NT technology as the previous versions and introduced significant new
features such as Active Directory. Windows 2000 took three and a half years to produce and
was the most tested and tuned version of Windows NT technology produced at the time. Win-
dows 2000 was the culmination of over eleven years of development spanning implementa-
tions on four architectures.
At the end of Windows 2000 development, we embarked on an ambitious plan to implement
new versions of the client and server systems, which would include new enhanced consumer
features and improved server capabilities. As plans developed, it became clear that implemen-
tation of the server features would cause a lag in the implementation of the client features, and
therefore, the releases were split. In August of 2001, Windows XP Professional and Windows
XP Home Edition were released, and a little over a year later, in March of 2003, Microsoft Win-
dows Server 2003 was released. In addition to the Intel x86 architecture, these systems con-
tained support for the Intel IA-64, marking Windows NT’s first move to 64-bit processing.
This book is the definitive work on the internal structures and workings of Windows XP and
Windows Server 2003. In addition, it offers a glimpse into the future of Windows’ move to
64-bit computing by covering AMD's introduction of the x64 architecture (AMD64) in 2003
and Intel's announced support (EM64T) in February 2004. A fully supported x64 client and
server release is planned in the first half of 2005, and this book contains many insights into
the implementation details of the x64 system.
The x64 architecture is the beginning of a new era for Windows NT at a time when the x86
architecture is beginning to show signs of old age. This architecture offers 32-bit x86 compat-
ibility at speed to protect legacy software investments, and provides 64-bit addressing capabil-
ity to address the most ambitious of new applications. This will protect 32-bit software