(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.