Microsoft now claims it will be able to deliver beta 3.0 of Windows NT 5.0 to end users by Thanksgiving Day, and that it is firmly on target to deliver the complete version in 1999. That emerged during a presentation by a Microsoft base architect NT 5.0 engineer to an audience of developers at Intel’s forum in Palm Springs. He told a small group of delegates: “I’ve more confidence than ever about our ship schedule. This is a 1999 product. There will be a beta out around Thanksgiving.” Any changes, he said, will revolve around improvements in performance. “We are nearly code complete. If you produce a BIOS that works with beta 2.0 of NT 5.0, it will be honoured in the future, that’s how confident we are.” The architect outlined a number of the features of NT 5.0, including improvements to the shell, extra storage and storage management features, support for Unicode 2.0 giving support for over 60 languages, performance improvements, better local networking support, security features and hardware. The hardware improvements, he said, were the most important part of NT 5.0. The OS will have support for ACPI, USB, 1394, multiple displays, DVD, AGP, and the Win32 driver model. “We have more legacy support than 4.0 including printers and scanners,” he said. “We are very competitive to Windows 98 with our drivers.” ®