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.

(2002-06-10)