< 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)