Windows NT

The first version of Windows NT was Windows NT 3.1 and was produced for workstations and server computers.

Windows NT 3.1 is an operating system that was produced by Microsoft as part of the Windows NT family of operating systems.

It was intended to complement consumer versions of Windows that were based on MS-DOS (including Windows 1.0 through Windows 3.1x).

Active Windows families include Windows NT and Windows Embedded; these may encompass subfamilies, e.g. Windows Embedded Compact (Windows CE) or Windows Server.

Starting with Windows 2000, "NT" was removed from the product name and is only included in the product version string. Windows Vista added native support for the Windows Driver Foundation, which is also available for Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and to an extent, Windows 2000.

Windows 2000 is an operating system that was produced by Microsoft as part of the Windows NT family of operating systems.

Gradually, the Windows NT family was expanded into Microsoft's general-purpose operating system product line for all personal computers, deprecating the Windows 9x family.

Windows NT, which was aimed at professional users such as networks and businesses, used a similar but separate version number between 3.1 and 4.0.

Initially, it supported several instruction set architectures, including IA-32, MIPS, and DEC Alpha; support for PowerPC, Itanium, x64, and ARM were added later.

Operating systems that supported Alpha included OpenVMS (previously known as OpenVMS AXP), Tru64 UNIX (previously known as DEC OSF/1 AXP and Digital UNIX), Windows NT (discontinued after NT 4.0; and pre-release Windows 2000 RC1), Linux (Debian, SUSE, Gentoo and Red Hat), BSD UNIX (NetBSD, OpenBSD and FreeBSD up to 6.x), Plan 9 from Bell Labs, as well as the L4Ka::Pistachio kernel.

Windows NT is a family of operating systems produced by Microsoft, the first version of which was released on July 27, 1993.

Meanwhile, the company was at work on a 32-bit OS, Microsoft Windows NT, which was heavily based on their copy of the OS/2 code.

Major features of the Windows NT family include Windows Shell, Windows API, Native API, Active Directory, Group Policy, Hardware Abstraction Layer, NTFS, BitLocker, Windows Store, Windows Update, and Hyper-V.

Group Policy is a feature of the Microsoft Windows NT family of operating systems that controls the working environment of user accounts and computer accounts.

Major features of the Windows NT family include Windows Shell, Windows API, Native API, Active Directory, Group Policy, Hardware Abstraction Layer, NTFS, BitLocker, Windows Store, Windows Update, and Hyper-V.

Starting with Windows NT 3.1, it is the default file system of the Windows NT family.

Major features of the Windows NT family include Windows Shell, Windows API, Native API, Active Directory, Group Policy, Hardware Abstraction Layer, NTFS, BitLocker, Windows Store, Windows Update, and Hyper-V.

The Native API is a lightweight application programming interface (API) used by Windows NT and user mode applications.

Major features of the Windows NT family include Windows Shell, Windows API, Native API, Active Directory, Group Policy, Hardware Abstraction Layer, NTFS, BitLocker, Windows Store, Windows Update, and Hyper-V.

Windows Update is a Microsoft service for the Windows 9x and Windows NT families of operating system, which automates downloading and installing Microsoft Windows software updates over the Internet.

Windows NT is a family of operating systems produced by Microsoft, the first version of which was released on July 27, 1993.

He would lead the development of the Windows NT operating system, which continues to serve as the basis for Microsoft's operating systems line.

Major features of the Windows NT family include Windows Shell, Windows API, Native API, Active Directory, Group Policy, Hardware Abstraction Layer, NTFS, BitLocker, Windows Store, Windows Update, and Hyper-V.

Starting with Windows 8, Hyper-V superseded Windows Virtual PC as the hardware virtualization component of the client editions of Windows NT.

It has been suggested that Dave Cutler intended the initialism "WNT" as a play on VMS, incrementing each letter by one.

These operating systems are Microsoft Windows NT, and Digital Equipment Corporation: RSX-11M, VAXELN, VMS (now OpenVMS).

However, the project was originally intended as a follow-on to OS/2 and was referred to as "NT OS/2" before receiving the Windows brand. Broad software compatibility was achieved with support for several API "personalities", including Windows API, POSIX, and OS/2 APIs – the latter two were phased out starting with Windows XP. Partial MS-DOS compatibility was achieved via an integrated DOS Virtual Machine – although this feature is being phased out in the x86-64 architecture.

Because of this heritage, OS/2 shares similarities with Unix, Xenix, and Windows NT.

Broad software compatibility was achieved with support for several API "personalities", including Windows API, POSIX, and OS/2 APIs – the latter two were phased out starting with Windows XP. Partial MS-DOS compatibility was achieved via an integrated DOS Virtual Machine – although this feature is being phased out in the x86-64 architecture.

Microsoft POSIX subsystem is one of four subsystems shipped with the first versions of Windows NT.

It has been suggested that Dave Cutler intended the initialism "WNT" as a play on VMS, incrementing each letter by one.

Roger Gourd was the project lead for the Starlet program, with software engineers Dave Cutler (who would later lead development of Microsoft's Windows NT), Dick Hustvedt, and Peter Lipman acting as the technical project leaders, each having responsibility for a different area of the operating system.

NT supported per-object (file, function, and role) access control lists allowing a rich set of security permissions to be applied to systems and services.

These entries are known as access-control entries (ACEs) in the Microsoft Windows NT, OpenVMS, Unix-like, and Mac OS X operating systems.

One of the original NT developers, Mark Lucovsky, states that the name was taken from the original target processor—the Intel i860, code-named N10 ("N-Ten").

Prior to this, he has worked at VMware He is noted for being a part of the team that designed and built the Windows NT operating system, which after Windows XP became the basis of all current Windows releases.

Initially, it supported several instruction set architectures, including IA-32, MIPS, and DEC Alpha; support for PowerPC, Itanium, x64, and ARM were added later.

IBM also had a full line of PowerPC based desktops built and ready to ship; unfortunately, the operating system that IBM had intended to run on these desktops—Microsoft Windows NT—was not complete by early 1993, when the machines were ready for marketing.

Windows Vista added native support for the Windows Driver Foundation, which is also available for Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and to an extent, Windows 2000.

Windows XP is a personal computer operating system produced by Microsoft as part of the Windows NT family of operating systems.

The full preemptive 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 Windows applications (although MS-DOS applications were preemptively multitasked in Windows starting with Windows/386).

Windows NT processor scheduling refers to the process by which Windows NT determines which job (task) should be run on the computer processor at which time.

Major features of the Windows NT family include Windows Shell, Windows API, Native API, Active Directory, Group Policy, Hardware Abstraction Layer, NTFS, BitLocker, Windows Store, Windows Update, and Hyper-V.

As of 2015, there were over 669,000 apps available on the store, which includes apps for Windows NT, Windows Phone, and UWP apps, which work on both platforms.

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 Windows shell design.

Program Manager is the shell of Windows 3.x and Windows NT 3.x operating systems.

The full preemptive 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 Windows applications (although MS-DOS applications were preemptively multitasked in Windows starting with Windows/386).

Examples of such systems are Solaris 2.0/SunOS 5.0, Windows NT, Linux kernel (2.6.x and newer), AIX and some BSD systems (NetBSD, since version 5).

Windows NT 3.1 featured a core kernel providing a system API, running in supervisor mode (ring 0 in x86; referred to in Windows NT as "kernel mode" on all platforms), and a set of user-space environments with their own APIs which included the new Win32 environment, an OS/2 1.3 text-mode environment and a POSIX environment.

Many modern CPU architectures (including the popular Intel x86 architecture) include some form of ring protection, although the Windows NT operating system, like Unix, does not fully utilize this feature.