BetaWiki:Featured article/2021-01

Windows NT 3.1 build 196.1 is an early build of Windows NT 3.1 from September 1991, and is an "experimental pre-release development kit" build. A picture of a disc containing this build was first provided by BetaArchive member ReflectiaX in 2018. On 18 December 2020, he obtained said disc and proceeded to share its contents. It is currently the earliest leaked build of Windows NT.

Being very early in development, this build starts to see early aspects of numerous features in Windows NT, such as an early version of NTLDR called OS2LDR, limited networking capabilities, the lack of a registry, and an early PE format that is not supported on later builds. It is one of the earliest builds to include user security, with the ability to toggle the administrator role on a user.