Microsoft hardware challenge: make PCs to run Windows NT

Electronic News, March 9, 1992 by Jonathan Cassell

SAN FRANCISCO -- Microsoft Corp. last week issued the PC industry its marching orders, releasing a list of specifications for hardware designed to run Windows NT and pressing vendors to comply by this fall.

At a conference attended by more than 200 sometimes skeptical hardware manufacturers, Microsoft challenged the industry to produce "Windows PCs" by this fall's Comdex trade show. By that term, the software vendor meant PCs offering far greater memory and storage than today's standard desktop machines, with such features as Windows NT compatibility, graphics and multimedia replacing price or brute performance as the central selling point for PCs.

Microsoft also made it clear it hopes to push PCs to higher levels of functionality by incorporating many features traditionally associated with PC hardware into the Windows NT operating system itself.

A key vehicle for this effort will be NT's Hardware Abstraction Layer, or HAL, which incorporates the ROM Bios, the I/O bus controller, the DMA controller, the timers, the real-time clock, cache control and interrupt dispatching.

Written almost entirely in C, the HAL will be easy for hardware manufacturers to modify, according to Rich Barth, Microsoft product manager for Windows NT. "All you have to do is change a couple of kilobytes of code and the HAL will support entirely new architectures," he said.

Microsoft said it will make available to manufacturers a sample HAL and development kit in late spring or summer.

Device drivers written in C have also been abstracted into NT, allowing manufacturers to build custom drivers on a standard model.

The ideal Windows NT PC, according to Microsoft, would be based on either an Intel i586 microprocessor, a MIPS Computer R4000 RISC chip or an Intel i486 running at 33MHz to 50MHz. Intel and MIPS chips are at the heart of the architecture adopted by the Advanced Computing Environment.

The machine would have a minimum of 8MB RAM, but Microsfot recommends 32MB RAM or more. A CD-ROM drive and a 300MB-or-larger hard drive would be standard. MPC audio, multimedia and networking capabilities would be built in.

CD-digital audio would be standard on all machines, in Microsoft's view, with high-end systems including 16-bit sampling at 44kHz and an optical cable connection to CD and digital audio tape systems.

A central feature of a Windows NT machine would be a Windows graphics accelerator chip which would provide such functions as digital video, television on the computer screen, video editing, three-dimensional graphics and enhanced color publishing.

A high-end display system would have a 19-inch, non-interlaced monitor with 1,280 X 1,024 resolution and 12 to 24 bits per pixel.

Microsoft is pushing for standard CD ROM because it plants to distribute NT and Windows applications via that medium. It also hopes the large storage capacity of CD ROMs will encourage ISVs to distribute more multimedia applications.

To increase throughput and facilitate two-way communication, Microsoft wants SCSI-II to be the standard interface for storage devices.

The minimum requirement for running the first version of NT, due late this year, is a 32-bit microprocessor and 8MB RAM, according to Mr. Barth. The minimum requirement for a monitor is 1,024 X 768 resolution with 8 bits per pixel.

Given Microsoft's recent momentum on the OS front, none of the manufacturers attending the conference seemed inclined to publicly reject Microsoft's roadmap or proposed timetable. But some manufacturers expressed uncertainty over whether they could produce machines conforming to Microsoft's guidelines by the time Comdex starts.

For his part, Mr. Barth said several manufacturers had already indicated to Microsoft that they will "take advantage" of NT's functions. He declined to provide further details.