Windows NT (New Technology) is a family of
operating systems produced by
Microsoft, the first version of which was released in July 1993. It was originally designed to be a powerful high-level-language-based, processor-independent, multiprocessing, multiuser operating system with features comparable to
Unix. It was intended to complement consumer versions of Windows that were based on
MS-DOS. NT was the first fully 32-bit version of Windows, whereas its consumer-oriented counterparts,
Windows 3.1x and
Windows 9x, were 16-bit/32-bit hybrids.
Windows XP,
Windows Server 2003,
Windows Vista,
Windows Server 2008 (beta), and
Windows Home Server are the latest versions of Windows, and are based upon the original Windows NT system (as was
Windows 2000), although they are not branded as Windows NT releases.
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<
operating system> (Windows New Technology, NT)
Microsoft's 32-bit
operating system developed from what was originally intended to be
OS/2 3.0 before
Microsoft and
IBM ceased joint development of OS/2. NT was designed for high end
workstations (Windows NT 3.1), servers (Windows NT 3.1 Advanced Server), and corporate networks (NT 4.0 Enterprise Server). The first release was
Windows NT 3.1.
Unlike
Windows 3.1, which was a graphical environment that ran on top of
MS-DOS, Windows NT is a complete operating system. To the user it looks like Windows 3.1, but it has true
multi-threading, built in networking, security, and
memory protection.
It is based on a
microkernel, with 32-bit addressing for up to 4Gb of
RAM, virtualised hardware access to fully protect applications, installable file systems, such as
FAT,
HPFS and
NTFS, built-in networking,
multi-processor support, and
C2 security.
NT is also designed to be hardware independent. Once the machine specific part - the
Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) - has been ported to a particular machine, the rest of the operating system should theorertically compile without alteration. A version of NT for
DEC's
Alpha machines was planned (September 1993).
NT needs a fast
386 or equivalent, at least 12MB of
RAM (preferably 16MB) and at least 75MB of free disk space.
NT 4.0 was followed by
Windows 2000.
Usenet newsgroups:
news:comp.os.ms-windows.nt.setup,
news:comp.os.ms-windows.nt.misc.
(2002-06-10)
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