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Windows NT is a family of operating systems produced by Microsoft, the first version of which was released in July 1993. more...
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It was originally designed to be a powerful high-level language-based processor-independent multiprocessing multiuser operating system with features comparable to Unix to complement workstation versions of Windows that were based on MS-DOS until 2001. It was the first fully 32-bit version of Windows, whereas its consumer-oriented counterparts, Windows 3.x and Windows 9x, are 16-bit/32-bit hybrids. Windows Vista and Windows Server 2003 are the latest versions of Windows based upon the original Windows NT system, although they are not branded as Windows NT releases.
Major features
A main design goal of NT was hardware and software portability. Versions of NT were available for a variety of processor architectures, namely Intel IA-32, MIPS, Alpha and PowerPC. Broad software compatibility was achieved with support for several API "personalities", including the primary Win32 API and limited support for POSIX and OS/2 APIs. For secure multiuser server solutions, NT supported per-object (file, function, role) Access Control Lists allowing a rich set of security permissions to be applied to systems and services. NT supported Windows network protocols, inheriting the previous OS/2 LAN Manager networking, as well as Unix's TCP/IP networking (for which Microsoft would implement a TCP/IP stack derived from the BSD Unix stack).
Windows NT was the first version of Windows to utilize 32-bit "flat" virtual memory addressing on 32-bit processors. Its predecessor, Windows 3.1, used segmented addressing and switches from 16-bit to 32-bit addressing in pages.
Windows NT 3.1 featured a core kernel providing a system API, running in supervisor mode, and a set of user-space environments with their own APIs which included the new Win32 environment, a OS/2 1.3 text-mode environment and a POSIX environment. The full pre-emptive multitasking kernel could interrupt running tasks to schedule other tasks, without relying on user programs to voluntarily give up control of the CPU, as in Windows 3.1.
Notably, in Windows NT 3.x, several I/O driver subsystems, such as video and printing, were user-mode subsystems. In Windows NT 4, the video subsystem was integrated into the kernel. Windows NT's first GUI was strongly influenced by (and programmatically compatible with) that from Windows 3.1; Windows NT 4's interface was redesigned to match that of the brand new Windows 95, moving from the Program Manager to the Start Menu/Taskbar design.
NTFS, a journaled, secure file system was created for NT. NT also allows for other installable file systems, and with versions 3.1 and 3.51, NT could also be installed on DOS's FAT or OS/2's HPFS file systems.
Read more at Wikipedia.org
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