Windows NT
<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.
