from
The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (8 July 2008)
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)