Windows NT
Windows NT is a proprietary graphical operating system produced by Microsoft as part of its Windows product line, the first version of which was released on July 27, 1993, and it lives on today, as the latest version of Windows, 11, includes its technology.
Written in
C, Assembly language
(core)
C++
(user mode applications, kernel graphical subsystem)
C#
(user mode applications)[1]
Current
Depending on version, edition or customer choice: Trialware, commercial software, volume licensing, OEM-only, SaaS, S+S[a]
The Windows NT name denotes major technology advancements that it introduced to the Windows product line including eliminating the 16-bit memory access limitations of earlier Windows releases. Each Windows release that includes its technology is considered to be based on, if not a revision of, Windows NT even though the Windows NT name has not been used since 1996.
Windows NT provides many features including:
Product line[edit]
Windows NT is a group or family of products — like Windows is a group or family. Windows NT is a sub-grouping of Windows.
The first version of Windows NT, 3.1, was produced for workstation and server computers. It was commercially focused — and intended to complement consumer versions of Windows that were based on MS-DOS (including Windows 1.0 through Windows 3.1x). In 1996, Windows NT 4.0 was released, including the new shell from Windows 95.
Eventually, Microsoft incorporated the Windows NT technology into the Windows product line for personal computing and deprecated the Windows 9x family. Starting with Windows 2000,[8] "NT" was removed from the product name yet is still in several low-level places in the system — including for a while as part of the product version.[9]
Installing[edit]
Versions of Windows NT are installed using Windows Setup, which, starting with Windows Vista, uses the Windows Preinstallation Environment, which is a lightweight version of Windows NT made for deployment of the operating system.
Naming[edit]
It has been suggested that Dave Cutler intended the initialism "WNT" as a play on VMS, incrementing each letter by one.[10] 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.[11] 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").[12] A 1998 question-and-answer (Q&A) session with Bill Gates revealed that the letters were previously expanded to "New Technology" but no longer carry any specific meaning.[13] The letters were dropped from the names of releases from Windows 2000 and later, though Microsoft described that product as being "Built on NT Technology".[8][14]
"NT" was a trademark of Northern Telecom (later Nortel), which Microsoft was forced to acknowledge on the product packaging.
Major features[edit]
One of the main purposes of NT is hardware and software portability. Various versions of NT family operating systems have been released for a variety of processor architectures, initially IA-32, MIPS, and DEC Alpha, with PowerPC, Itanium, x86-64 and ARM supported in later releases. An initial idea was to have a common code base with a custom Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) for each platform. However, support for MIPS, Alpha, and PowerPC was later dropped in Windows 2000. Broad software compatibility was initially achieved with support for several API "personalities", including Windows API, POSIX,[15] and OS/2 APIs[16] – the latter two were phased out starting with Windows XP.[17] Partial MS-DOS and Windows 16-bit compatibility is achieved on IA-32 via an integrated DOS Virtual Machine – although this feature is not available on other architectures.[18]
NT has supported per-object (file, function, and role) access control lists allowing a rich set of security permissions to be applied to systems and services. NT
has also supported Windows network protocols, inheriting the previous OS/2 LAN Manager networking, as well as TCP/IP networking (for which Microsoft used to implement a TCP/IP stack derived at first from a STREAMS-based stack from Spider Systems, then later rewritten in-house).[19]
Windows NT 3.1 was the first version of Windows to use 32-bit flat virtual memory addressing on 32-bit processors. Its companion product, 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 (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. 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).
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, server, and printer spooler subsystems were moved into kernel mode. 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.
NTFS, a journaled, secure file system, is a major feature of NT. Windows NT also allows for other installable file systems; NT can also be installed on FAT file systems, and versions 3.1, 3.5, and 3.51 could be installed HPFS file systems.[20]
Windows NT introduced its own driver model, the Windows NT driver model, and is incompatible with older driver frameworks. With Windows 2000, the Windows NT driver model was enhanced to become the Windows Driver Model, which was first introduced with Windows 98, but was based on the NT driver model.[21] 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.
Supported platforms[edit]
32-bit platforms[edit]
In order to prevent Intel x86-specific code from slipping into the operating system, due to developers being used to developing on x86 chips, Windows NT 3.1 was initially developed using non-x86 development systems and then ported to the x86 architecture. This work was initially based on the Intel i860-based Dazzle system and, later, the MIPS R4000-based Jazz platform. Both systems were designed internally at Microsoft.[55]
Windows NT 3.1 was released for Intel x86 PC compatible and PC-98 platforms, and for DEC Alpha and ARC-compliant MIPS platforms. Windows NT 3.51 added support for the PowerPC processor in 1995, specifically PReP-compliant systems such as the IBM ThinkPad Power Series laptops and Motorola PowerStack series; but despite meetings between Michael Spindler and Bill Gates, not on the Power Macintosh as the PReP compliant Power Macintosh project failed to ship.
Intergraph Corporation ported Windows NT to its Clipper architecture and later announced an intention to port Windows NT 3.51 to Sun Microsystems' SPARC architecture,[56] in conjunction with the company's planned introduction of UltraSPARC models in 1995,[57] but neither version was sold to the public as a retail product.
Only two of the Windows NT 4.0 variants (IA-32 and Alpha) have a full set of service packs available. All of the other ports done by third parties (Motorola, Intergraph, etc.) have few, if any, publicly available updates.
Windows NT 4.0 was the last major release to support Alpha, MIPS, or PowerPC, though development of Windows 2000 for Alpha continued until August 1999, when Compaq stopped support for Windows NT on that architecture; and then three days later Microsoft also canceled their AlphaNT program,[58] even though the Alpha NT 5 (Windows 2000) release had reached RC1 status.[59]
On January 5, 2011, Microsoft announced that the next major version of the Windows NT family will include support for the ARM architecture. Microsoft demonstrated a preliminary version of Windows (version 6.2.7867) running on an ARM-based computer at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show.[60] This eventually led to the commercial release of the Windows 8-derived Windows RT on October 26, 2012, and the use of Windows NT, rather than Windows CE, in Windows Phone 8.
According to Microsoft, it is a common misconception that the Xbox and Xbox 360 use a modified Windows 2000 kernel. In reality, the Xbox operating system was built from scratch but implements a subset of Windows APIs.[61] The Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S, however, do use a modified version of Windows 10.[62]
Windows 11 is the first non-server version of Windows NT that does not support 32-bit platforms.[63][64]
64-bit platforms[edit]
The 64-bit versions of Windows NT were originally intended to run on Itanium and DEC Alpha; the latter was used internally at Microsoft during early development of 64-bit Windows.[65][66] This continued for some time after Microsoft publicly announced that it was cancelling plans to ship 64-bit Windows for Alpha.[67] Because of this, Alpha versions of Windows NT are 32-bit only.
While Windows 2000 only supports Intel IA-32 (32-bit), Windows XP, Server 2003, Server 2008 and Server 2008 R2 each have one edition dedicated to Itanium-based systems.[68][69][70] In comparison with Itanium, Microsoft adopted x64 on a greater scale: every version of Windows since Windows XP (which has a dedicated x64 edition)[71] has x64 editions.[68][72]
The first version of Windows NT to support ARM64 devices with Qualcomm processors was Windows 10, version 1709.[73] This is a full version of Windows, rather than the cut-down Windows RT.