Windows NT got its name from one of Intel’s failed x86 replacements

Dave Farquhar published an article today about Windows NT 3.1's place in the market when it was originally released, and while the article is interesting and a fun read, it does mention this:

[...] Microsoft took its nascent code that it intended to form the base of OS/2 3.0, renamed it Windows New Technology, and eventually released it as Windows NT 3.1.

Dave Farquhar

While Microsoft did, in fact, use the New Technology" branding as a marketing trick, this is not what NT" originally stood for. Two developers from the original Windows NT development team, Mark Lucovsky and David Thompson, explained all the way back in 2003 that NT" came from the codename for Intel's then-new RISC platform, the Intel i860 (Raymond Chen confirmed the veracity of their story). The i860 was the first target platform for Windows NT, and it was codenamed N-10" - NT.

Finally, it was time to start writing some code. We checked the first code pieces in around mid-December 1988," Lucovsky said, and had a very basic system kind of booting on a simulator of the Intel i860 (which was codenamed N-Ten") by January." In fact, this is where NT actually got its name, Lucovsky revealed, adding that the new technology" moniker was added after the fact in a rare spurt of product marketing by the original NT team members. Originally, we were targeting NT to the Intel i860, a RISC processor that was horribly behind schedule. Because we didn't have any i860 machines in-house to test on, we used an i860 simulator. That's why we called it NT, because it worked on the N-Ten.'"

Paul Thurrott

The i860 was one of Intel's many attempts over the years to replace x86 with something more modern, but - as would become tradition with Intel and attempting to replace its x86 architecture - it suffered from endless delays, missed targets, and lacklustre performance. It saw only sporadic use in the market, and ended up on the chopping block after only a few years. Intel tried to replace x86 again soon after with Itanium, which suffered an identical fate.

Still, the engineers working on the i860 platform in the late '80s and early '90s at Intel can at least take some pride in that to this day, the most popular desktop operating system in the world got its name from the product they developed. Intel's i860 might barely even be worthy of a footnote today, but billions of PC users log into their Windows N-10" machines every day, unwittingly carrying a torch for the failed x86 replacement.