Microsoft, 1996. Windows.
Windows NT 4.0 was released to manufacturing on 31 July 1996 and reached shops on 24 August 1996, as the successor to Windows NT 3.51. It was aimed at servers and business workstations. Its most visible change was the user interface of Windows 95: the Start menu, the taskbar, Windows NT Explorer, and names such as My Computer. Inside Microsoft it was known as the Shell Update Release.
It also improved performance and stability, and added a cryptography API, DCOM, TAPI 2.0, limited DirectX support, and a new Task Manager for watching programs and processor and memory use. Several features of Microsoft Plus! for Windows 95 came included, among them the Space Cadet pinball table and font smoothing. Its last service pack was Service Pack 6a.
NT 4.0 was the last Windows NT release for Alpha, MIPS and PowerPC processors, and the last with “NT” in its product name. Windows 2000 succeeded most editions on 17 February 2000, but businesses kept using NT 4.0 for years. Security updates for NT 4.0 Workstation ended on 30 June 2004.
This exhibit starts NT 4.0 Workstation, “with Microsoft Internet Explorer”, at its logon screen, which asks you to press Ctrl+Alt+Delete.