“The Coming Of Windows NT”

Users and application developers welcome Microsoft's latest Operating system, but Doubts remain over where it will fit into process control

Control Magazine
Phil H. Shook, Contributing Editor

After thousands of beta tests, assorted unveilings, demonstrations, and missed delivery deadlines, the long-running dress rehearsal for the Windows NT operating system is finally over.

The product has been delivered. The real testing has begun.

At least the product was scheduled to have been delivered in the past month

Now process control engineers and consultants can join the professional second guessers to see if the most recent "operating system of the future," from Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft Corp., will be faster, stronger, and smarter where it counts: on the plant floor.

NT's advanced billing has stirred great expectations, along with a host of questions and a few doubts.

Many observers suggest that there are two NTs to be evaluated: the first version, which was just released, and the more mature, debugged system that will take two or three years to evolve.

"In the long run, there is a good feeling that NT will answer a lot of the real-time desires in the control area," says one process control consultant. "But in the short run, I wouldn't want to be the first person to use it."

While some users of industrial personal computers (PCs) can't wait to upbrade to NT, there are some that are perfectly happy with its precursor, Microsoft?s Windows 3.1, and are oblivious to all the fuss. "It is a lot of overkill for some people," says Steve Reichard of Reichard Controls in Perrysburg, Ohio.

He says a lot of his customers have small systems - one or two computers monitoring a couple of hundred setpoints - and buying a computer with enough hardware to run NT doesn't always make sense.

On another level, many high-end industrial users comfortable with existing PC architecture say NT's arrival will be difficult to ignore. "We are definitely going to have a few implementations of NT. Someone is going to try it," says Bill Cotter, process instrumentation specialist with Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing (3M), St. Paul, Minn.

The entry fee is not high. A Windows NT package costs $495, but a limited time promotion offers it for $295 to current users of Windows or OS/2, the latter being an International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) operating system it may try to unseat. The hardware requirements are a personal computer with an Intel 386 processor or better running at 25 MHz, but even Microsoft spokesmen recommend a 486-based machine with 16 MB or RAM and 70 MB of free disk space. Windows NT Advanced Server, for higher-level computers, costs $1,495 now, but its price will double in six months.

The Promise Of NT

Eric Bennett, a senior engineer with Coca-Cola USA, Atlanta, and a current user of Windows, is enthusiastic about NT's potential. Dozens of PSs are used in control and data acquisition applications at a number of the company's syrup plants. In addition

To providing graphical, color-based interfaces for operators to interact with their processes, PCs are used extensively at the plants to communicate with programmable logic controllers (PLCs) in gathering and transferring information between the business system and the shop floor.

An upgrade to NT could bring some immediate benefits, Bennett says. "We are using a lot of Windows and the ability to have a true multitasking , pre-emptive operating system of that genre is real exciting." He says with NT there is a lot of potential to be able to make process control on the plant floor work better, quicker, and be "more friendly to the folks."

Bennett says he will see how many bugs come with the first release of NT and that there is not rush to jump into full production with it. He adds that a small application will be set up at a plant with a warning that there is "a potential that this won't exactly work."

"If Windows NT goes a long way toward addressing this-where you no longer have memory management conflicts, where you don't have to constantly be diddling with that' I would say it's a tremendous step forward," Henderson remarks.

In the past, Henderson figures he has spent a thousand hours figuring out how to solve one problem that he will never run into again.

Greg Hicks, division automation engineer for Texaco Production Div. In Midland, Texas, says he will follow the development of NT carefully for possible applications at his operation. He currently uses some 700 GE Fanuc and Bristol PLCs linked to PC networks running a Windows-over-DOS application of Wonderware's InTouch to control vast upstream oil and gas operations that stretch from Utah to Texas.

Hicks says some of the major selling points of Windows software applications are the networkability, configurability, and user friendliness of the software. "We can get a system up in a quarter of the time that it takes for a normal system," he adds.

NT would just be a step up from that, Hicks says. "We can keep what we have and we can bump the main machine up to NT," he says. Hicks has worked with a preliminary version of NT and comments, "Windows 3.1 can work with NT and it is seamless, just like Microsoft says."

Windows Without The Headaches

Presented as a replacement for the popular DOS and Windows 3.1 - a shell that ran on top of DOS - NT's designers say the new operating system combines the Windows interface and the robust power and sophistication of a carefully crafted, standalone operating system.

While it is advertised as Windows without the headaches-including built-in safeguards against crashes-Windows NT looks and acts almost exactly like Windows 3.1 on the desktop. Available on floppy disk and CD-ROM, NT offers easy start-up, 4.3 million lines of code, and a reported $150 million development cost pedigree.

Based on a true 32-bit, pre-emptive multitasking, multithreaded operating system, NT has an internal module called the scheduler that decides which running applications get CPU time.

As Phil Huber, vice president of reengineering for Wonderware Software Development, describes it, the Windows NT architecture is an entirely different animal from previous Windows versions. "It is built on a kernel that provides advanced features such as true 32-bit addressing, symmetric multi-processing, preemptive multi-tasking, and new levels of security." Previous Windows versions (up to 3.1) have been 16-bit operationg environments that run on top of DOS and rely on DOS for much of their functionality.

Analysts say Microsoft's goal with NT is to create an advanced operating system that will be around for years. It is designed to run at greatly enhanced speeds, processing 32 bits of information at a time compared with DOS' 16.

In NT, Texaco's Hicks sees a system free from the constraints of Windows' 640K environment. "That is the biggest selling point of NT," he says. "Running on 32 bits, you are using the full capability of your machine. You open up the whole machine instead of trying to cram everything through one little funnel."

NT is designed to produce greatly enhanced graphics and it has built-in security features that meet the scrutiny of corporate and government customers.

The new operating system will come in a desktop version and Windows NT Advanced Server, which is designed to be a powerful enterprise-wide network operating system.

In addition to claims of improved power, speed, and efficiencies, NT is designed to run the thousands of application programs that have been written for DFOS. It can perform more than one task at a time and it can link many different kinds of printers and other gear in a single command system. NT also is designed to be portable and can run on different classes of microprocessors, making it suitable for machines such as workstations, servers that link networks, and other mid-range computers.

Despite its complexity, Microsoft vows that NT will be crash-proof. "Security features are excellent with NT in our estimation," says Jay Bartlett with City Water Light and Power, the Springfield, Ill., utility company.

Because NT multitasks pre-emptively, it can suspend one running application to give control to another, eliminating the possibility of one application occupying all of the CPU's time. Pre-emptive multitasking means that a task with a higher priority can pre-empt a currently running task. In DOS, the task that has control of the processor can keep control until it voluntarily gives it up.

Users say pre-emptive multitasking can significantly boost efficiency, especially when loading or working with multiple programs at the same time. This is the most important feature of Windows NT for the control environment, according to Bartlett. "That is very important because we need to make sure that certain applications get processor time slices." For example, he says City Water Light and Power's computer must give some attention to a secondary trending package--something that is not guaranteed in Windows 3.1.

Windows NT also supports multithreaded applications. That means that an application can have multiple processes, or threads (separate routines or operations within a program), running concurrently. In beta tests, Bartlett explains, the utility had Windows for Workgroups seamlessly talking to Windows NT and to Windows NT Advanced Server.

NT Seeks High End

While NT could be run on an Intel 386-based machine with beefed up memory, most prospective users plan to use it on 486-based computers. Nevertheless, some plant engineers say they are not concerned about the hardware cost. "We don't buy anything but 486s, so the cost [difference] is virtually insignificant," Says Georgia-Pacific's Henderson.

Others see the upgrade as a significant step that may not be justifiable for every user.

The cost of the upgrade to NT can be "incidental," says Steve Soltz, product marketing manager with Intellution, "but only if your system has a huge hard disk and a big memory."

NT arrives on the scene at a time when software vendors are responding to the move of plants from proprietary to open systems architectures. They are writing applications for multiple operating systems. Plant engineers, who previously relied on variants of the UNIX operating software or proprietary systems, now have another high-end operating system to consider.

NT takes its place among others billed as operating systems of the future, including Digital Equipment Corp.'s OpenVMS, IBM's OS/2 , and the two competing UNIX camps, OSF/1 and UNIX International.

For some control professionals, the selection of the operating system has become just as important as the choice of hardware and software. In NT, City Water's Bartlett says he is looking for the advantages of Windows without its flaws.

NT's Future

Despite its proponents, NT's long-term mission remains murky to some high-end users.

Bobby Blass, assistant administrator of LAN and UNIX minicomputers at Courtaulds Fibers in Mobile, Ala., says there are mixed signals from Microsoft over where the NT product will be marketed.

"I felt Microsoft intentionally created confusion to keep people on hold," he says. "I had a Microsoft rep come by and tell me that it would be a good replacement on office PCs where we are now using OS/2. But what I understand is coming to market is not an office PC solution, and I felt that was quite misleading. Either that or they weren't quite sure how it was going to end up."

Cotter of 3M says "reality began to set in" when NT's initial delivery times were missed. "It was promised to be everyman's operating system. Now it is going to be your server, if your server is really big," he says.

With NT, Microsoft may be trying to make too many people happy, Cotter notes, suggesting that it can't be all things to all people. "I have simple needs, you have simple needs, but our needs don't all mesh," he says.

Some of the questions about NT will be answered fairly quickly, say process control professionals. "How complete NT will be is still a question in my mind and a lot of other people's," says Intellution's Soltz.

Despite some reservations about NT's early claims, Cotter says it already is having an impact on software producers. "Every one of our vendors is telling us he is working on an NT product."

While Microsoft is betting that the new operating system will offer real advantages over existing platforms such as VMS, OS/2, or UNIX, no one expects Microsoft to take the industrial market by storm, at least not at the outset.

"Most people think they can run the same applications under Windows, so they are not going to go to NT quickly," says Intellution?s Soltz. "You are not going to buy it to run your word processing software and your spreadsheets. It doesn't do a lot for you there."

Others say NT is coming out of the box as a threat to Novell's networking programs and in competition with UNIX, the high-end operating system that already does many of the things that NT advertises.

"We do not see NT as a competitor to OS/2,? says Dennis Waldenmayer, marketing manager for Xycom, a manufacturer of industrial computers. Instead, Waldenmayer predicts Windows 4.0 will take on OS/2 while NT is ?aimed squarely at UNIX."

Tony Baer, a consultant with Advanced Manufacturing Research in Boston, says OS/2 has the edge over NT in the short term. "OS/2 certainly has it beat in terms of features and in terms of robustness," he says.

But from an applications standpoint, NT is a cut above the competition, says Intellution's Soltz. He says NT is offering everything that OS/2 provided, "but there will actually be software to run on it."

Some industrial markets will be tougher than others for NT to crack, says Baer. While the PLC market has embraced PCs and all the applications that come with them, he says distributed control system (DCS) vendors are leaning more toward UNIX workstations.

"It is not so much out of love of UNIX but more that UNIX was there before anything else," Baer says. He points out that fisher-Rosemont Systems Div. has agreements to port its operator stations to the UNIX/RISC platform of Sun Microsystems.

There already is a critical mass of movement in the DCS industry toward UNIX, Baer says, but breakthroughs are possible for the newest entry in industrial operating systems. "I wouldn't be swurprised to see Honeywell do an end around and go to NT," he says.

"NT obviously has caused all the systems software vendors to tighten up. You see a lot more of the UNIX world getting together on standards," says Courtaulds' Blass. He explains that the arrival of NT is "one of many factors" that has caused IBM to become more competitive and take a hard look at networking.

David Kafka, monitoring and control systems team leader at Chevron Research Technology, Richmond, calif., says that when he talks to vendors that provide products that Chevron uses, they mention NT and Motif-based products. "They don't even mention Macintosh," he says. "That's the impact that NT is going to have on us inside Chevron and the secondhand effect it is going to have on Macs."

September 1993