The Microsoft Windows NT reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Apr-2004 (provided by Fixed Reference: snapshots of Wikipedia from wikipedia.org)

Microsoft Windows NT

Microsoft Windows NT (Windows "New Technology"/NTen) is an operating system produced by Microsoft Corporation. It is the ancestor of their current flagship Windows XP.

When developments started, back in 1988, Windows NT was supposed to be a 32-bit, portable version of OS/2. At the time, OS/2 1.x was an operating system developed as a joint project between Microsoft and IBM. Although running in protected mode, it was only 16-bit and tightly coupled with the Intel 80286 processor architecture. IBM was very attached to the idea of providing its customers, who massively bought the PS/2 Intel 80286-based systems, released in 1987, with a suitable advanced operating system.

Although at the time OS/2 was only 16-bit, just like Windows 2.0, it featured a more elaborated and alas incompatible API. This became a fatal problem over time.

Indeed, in addition to working on 16-bit and 32-bit versions of OS/2, Microsoft was still working in parallel on normal, and less resource-demanding, Windows. When Windows 3.0 has been released in May 1990, it was such a huge success that Microsoft thought it was important to make the API of the still not released 32-bit OS compatible with the 16-bit API of Windows 2.x and 3.0, rather than with the 16-bit OS/2 API, since OS/2 did not enjoy very much success and did not have many applications yet.

Year 1990 was very confusing, with Microsoft and IBM wondering how to make a 32-bit operating system which would support 2 different APIs, and developpers wondering what API to write applications for. The net effect was that the collaboration fell apart. IBM continued OS/2 developments alone, while Microsoft renamed their portable 32-bit OS to Windows NT, changing the main API to a 32-bit version of its Win16 API.

Microsoft hired a group of developers from Digital Equipment Corporation to build a new system. Many elements of NT reflect the earlier DEC experience with VMS and RSX-11

NT enjoyed more success than OS/2, due to its feature promises and to Microsoft's market prowess.

The following are the major releases of Windows NT :

• Microsoft Windows NT 3.1 -- released 1993 (22 floppy disks, or 3 + CD-ROM)
• Microsoft Windows NT 3.5
• Microsoft Windows NT 3.51 -- released 1995
• Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 -- released 1996

Microsoft Windows 2000 and Windows XP are later versions of Windows NT:

• Microsoft Windows 2000 (Version 5.0)
• Microsoft Windows XP (Version 5.1)

Windows NT is now simply called Windows:

• Microsoft Windows Server 2003 (Version 5.2)

Version 3.1, the first version based on "NT Technology" (which was numbered to match that of the then-current Windows 3.1 -- magazines of that era claimed the number was also used to make the version seem more reliable than a ".0" release), came in "Advanced Server" and "Workstation" editions. From Version 3.5, "Advanced Server" was renamed "Server". From Version 5.0 (Windows 2000) onwards, "Workstation" was renamed "Professional". A "Home Edition" was introduced with Version 5.1 (XP), to mark the discontinuation of the previous MS-DOS based Windows system.

While Microsoft has never officially stated that NT stands for "New Technology", the acronym WNT was acknowledged by its ex-Digital developer, Dave Cutler, to be a pun on VMS—obtained by shifting each letter one position in alphabetical order, akin to the urban legend regarding the name of IBM and the villanous computer HAL 9000, as featured in the film . Another early Windows NT engineer Mark Lucovsky states that the NT was named for Intel's ill-fated RISC processor the i860 (code named the "N Ten") which was the processor Microsoft originally started developing Windows NT for.

NT uses a highly layered design, with the hardware hidden from the NT kernel by a hardware abstraction layer, and most operating system API functionality provided by API-specific interface modules that present specific functionality such as the Win32, OS/2, DOS and POSIX system call compatibility environments.

Windows NT was the first operating system to use Unicode internally.

See also: Blue screen of death.

History of Microsoft Windows

Windows: 1.0 | 2.0 | 3.x | NT | 95 | 98 | Me | 2000 | XP | CE | PPC | WM | Longhorn

External links

• Windows NT and VMS: The Rest of the Story, discussion of ancestry of NT by Mark Russinovich
• A Brief History of the Windows NT Operating System a Microsoft Presspass Fact Sheet

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