Other stuff through friends, and various places I've worked, and of course local 'swap meets' and ebay.

I just hate that every time I move, I invariably seem to lose stuff.

Looking back it was simply a symptom of not having enough memory, and having a really slow disk. Even though at some point I got 'smarter' and got a SCSI controller and disk for paging, and two IDE disks / controlers split for the OS & data. The more busses certainly helped.

I wish I could find the CD's but I used to have some really super old beta's and I suspect the 1992 one was in there. From what I can recall is that it didn't have a real setup program, it just xcopied itself onto your disk, and then slapped down a new boot record. Like the book mentions the super early versions had *NO* ability to run MS-DOS, OS/2 or Win16 programs. The networking was shakey at best, I don't recall it having TCP/IP which is probably why they outsourced that function.

I recall it 'feeling' more like OS/2 1.3 and it was splashed with *LOTS* of NT OS/2 stuff still in the help files and stuff, as they were so busy trying to get things in order..

But even at the time, it was a major step, as if you were really lucky you got the preliminary C compiler, and it was the first time you could really play with a 32bit OS. I recall the 'demo' of the day being some boxes bouncing around in 4 windows.. At the time multi-threading was still new & exciting, even in the OS/2 world, but with IBM out of the way, NT got a chance to get real.

I know somewhere kicking around I think I have the March 1993 beta… which I think was their RC 1.. It's really not that much different from the release as by then they were mostly doing application testing, and fixing bugs around that.. The last part of the book goes into some big deal with Aldus Pagemaker 5.0 & NT not printing and loading fonts correctly.

I'd suspect to load the beta you'd need to fix the same files that prevent NT 3.1 from installing on modern CPU's…..

As long as your VMWare can emulate IDE I'd imagine it'd work ok.

When you say early versions, are you referring to the early development (alpha) code? I currently have a beta build (388) I would like to try and install in VMWare, but I don't even know how to get it working or even sure it will work.

I am also surprise to know that there are even earlier test builds dating back to 1992, I think the first public build was 297 which was released at PDC '92, would like to see screenshots of that.

Its really fascinating to know that an operating system that dates back to the first Bush administration continues do so well, regardless of the ups and downs it has been through. I currently have NT 3.1, 3.5, 3.51, 4.0, 2000 running in a VPC and its fun to look back and try overcoming the challenges of even making them work with each other. NT is definitely a fascinating and even more interesting operating system from development aspect than Linux. Understanding the struggles that it went through to become what it is today, running on over 1.3 billion computers. It definitely is definitely a showstopper and there is no stopping it!