All the hype surrounding Microsoft Corp’s Windows NT has drawn attention away from the fact that the real monster seller that for at least its first two or three years of life will relegate NT to niche product status is Windows 4.0. Being developed alongside MS-DOS 7.0 under the code-name Chicago, Windows 4.0 is expected next year. It will incorporate the functionality of Windows for Workgroups, and will include its own native 32-bit file system and device drivers integrated with a Windows kernel so that it will not technically require MS-DOS to run, although it may be packaged so that MS-DOS 7.0, which will also include the 32-bit features, has to be installed first. But Windows 4.0 will support the full Win32 application programming interface, and will include pre-emptive multi-tasking, and it will also have a user interface that is similar to, if not identical to the parallel Cairo object-oriented development effort. Windows 4 will also inlcude release 2.0 of Object Linking and Embedding, and should run most NT applications. MS-DOS 7 will have full 32-bit internals but no 32-bit programming interface, InformationWeek reports, because, Microsoft says, developers have taken advantage of so many 16-bit MS-DOS features that moving to a 32-bit programming interface would be virtually impossible. Cairo is now being described as the next major release of NT, and may well be the release that the market waits for before deciding to commit to NT. It will include graphical interface enhancements and offer a distributed object-oriented file system. As for NT, Microsoft is back describing it as primarily a server operating system, and acknowledging that vendors are unlikely to bundle it with more than about 10% of the desktop machines they ship. Meantime Microsoft will launch MS-DOS 6 next Tuesday, March 30.
