Microsoft briefs developers on future operating systems.

3/14/96 -- Operating systems. Remember those? Amid all the commotion in the Internet department this week, Microsoft revealed details about future Windows enhancements at its Professional Developers' Conference in San Francisco.

Microsoft is working on updates both to Windows 95--its "classic" OS--and to Windows NT, which has exceeded Microsoft's expectations of market demand. An Internet add-on for both products, scheduled for release in the second half of 1996, will bring API- and interface- compatibility across both systems for the first time. (Windows NT's plug-and-play features, however, still won't match those of Windows 95.) The add-on for Windows 95 will have an integrated browser and an http peer server, which will enable Windows 95 PCs to function as basic Internet servers.

Major overhauls of both systems are scheduled for 1997. Windows 95 is code-named Memphis, and Windows NT is code-named Cairo.

Service Pack: Security, Storage, and FAT32

Microsoft will also release a new Windows service pack to PC manufacturers that will support the 32-bit PC Card standard, IRQ sharing on PCI systems, new storage devices (including the new 120MB floppy disk), DirectX 2.0, and a new cryptography API for supporting digital signatures.

The features in the Internet add-on and the Windows service pack were previously referred to as Nashville, but Microsoft has not yet settled on a name for the final release.

The new FAT32 file system, the Windows service pack's most interesting feature, will support hard disks above the current 2GB limit without the cluster-size problems of the current scheme. The existing FAT system, invented 20 years ago by Bill Gates, makes inefficient use of drives over 512MB. The new FAT32, on the other hand, will support very large drives with 2K clusters.

Since FAT32 will change the data structures that catalog the contents of the hard disk, it will not be compatible with many utility packages. For this reason, Microsoft is offering it only in the Windows service pack and is not making it available directly to end users. Converting Windows NT's NTFS file system to Windows 95 is not possible, because Windows 95 does not have Windows NT's security features, which are integrated directly into NTFS.

Tying In the Intranet

Windows NT 4.0 will include a new Directory Naming Services (DNS) server, which will be much improved over the primitive one in the Windows NT Resource Kit. The new DNS server will support Universal Naming Convention (UNC) addresses in addition to traditional IP addresses, making it well suited to corporate intranets. Cairo's directory services will also use the new DNS naming system. This means that administrators will be able to use the Internet's familiar URL scheme for naming files and resources on internal networks.

Other enhancements in Windows NT 4.0 include support for internal routing of IP and IPX protocols; RAS Multilink for bonding multiple communication channels into a single logical one; DirectX for high-speed multimedia and 3-D; a new public-key cryptography API; and Remoted Program Load (RPL) for booting Windows 95 systems.

Object Distribution and Clustering

But most significant, according to Microsoft, is Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 95's support of Distributed COM (Common Object Model). COM is the fundamental object model in OLE. Distributed COM will allow programmers and administrators to distribute objects across a network and run them on the remote system as though the objects were local. A COM object will not require any coding changes to operate in a distributed environment.

After Cairo, Microsoft will implement clustering in Windows NT to enable multiple NT systems to appear as a single logical one. The first phase of Windows NT clustering, scheduled for release this year, will support two systems operating as fault-tolerant backups for one another. Phase 2, scheduled for 1997, will allow up to 16 systems to operate in a cluster for performance scaling.

Microsoft also reiterated its support for the Simply Interactive PC initiative, a movement Microsoft is spearheading to create a simpler personal computer. The SIPC, which would not even have an on/off switch, would make all add-on components easily accessible, eliminating the need to open the unit at any time. In fact, Microsoft envisions a completely sealed box, much like a television.--Larry Seltzer