Windows NT 4.0 brought the Win95 UI to servers 30 years ago today — milestone unifying modern Windows OS hit RTM in the Pentium era

Windows NT 4.0 reached RTM on July 31, 1996, blending the Windows 95 look with NT’s enterprise-grade kernel.

It added the Start menu and Taskbar, while keeping hardware requirements low enough for many Pentium-era systems.

It was the last NT release to support Alpha, MIPS, and PowerPC, marking a major turning point for the platform.

NT 4.0 helped unify Microsoft’s consumer and enterprise Windows designs and strengthened NT against Unix servers.

It also became the technical foundation for Windows XP and later Windows versions.