Search in: Word
Vietnamese keyboard: Off
Virtual keyboard: Show
Computing (FOLDOC) dictionary
Windows NT
Jump to user comments
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
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,
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).