<
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)