Essay About History Of Windows Nt And Features Of Windows Nt

Windows Nt
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The history of Windows NT
The features of Windows NT
The history of Windows NT:
The history of Windows NT goes back to the early 80s, when
Microsoft was working on the original Windows system to run on top
of DOS. They joined forces with IBM in order to create a more
powerful DOS replacement that would run on the Intel x86 platform.
The resulting operating system was to be known as OS/2. At the
same time OS/2 was being developed, Microsoft was busy working
on a new OS, more powerful than the Windows system they already
had. This “New Technology” operating system would run on different
processor platforms. They planned to accomplish this by writing
most of the operating system in the C programming language, which
is a language that is portable across platforms. In late October of
1988, Microsoft hired a man named David Cutler who was a
respected operating systems guru from Digital Equipment
Corporation, to help them design their new operating system. The
original planned name was OS/2 NT because at the time, Microsoft
was helping to develop OS/2 and was integrating parts of it into its
new operating system (NT). After almost two years of work, the first
bits of OS/2 NT ran on an Intel i860 processor. Around the same
time, David Cutler projected to Bill Gates that NT would ship around
March 1991, which turned out be more than two years off the mark.
In early 1990, as teams dedicated to NT were formed within
Microsoft, Bill Gates criticized NT for being “too big, and too slow”
during a review. The decision was eventually made in early 1991 to
base NTs “personality” on Microsofts current Windows system,
version 3.0, and not OS/2. In other words, the personality (the API
and user interface in addition to other things) of the new operating
system was to be “modeled” after Windows 3.0. The OS/2 NT name
was dropped; the new name was to be Windows NT. When version
3.0 of Microsofts regular Windows (the one based on MS-DOS) was
released by Microsoft in the early 90s, it gained a large user base
rather quickly. In early 1991, IBM became aware that Microsoft was
planning to use Windows and not OS/2 as the user interface and API
for its new OS. As IBM became less of a player and Microsoft
applied its Windows environment to NT, Bill Gates and his Windows
NT team, lead by David Cutler, pushed forward with the development
of NT. Microsoft effectively cut all ties with IBM as far as their
development of OS/2. Coding and testing of NT continued in the
following months, and Windows NT version 3.1 was released on July
17, 1993.
Even though this was the first version of Windows NT, Microsoft
made the decision to name it version 3.1 instead of 1.0 in order
to, in a way, integrate it with its current Windows OS which was
already on the market. They thought that naming it version 1.0
may make people skeptical of its reliability
. Version 3.5 of
Windows NT followed short time later. Even since version 3.1,
the operating system has been totally 32-bit. Microsoft has
continued to refine their operating system over the years with a
series of service packs and hotfixes, designed to patch
shortcomings and security issues. A major revision, version 4.0,
was released in August 1996 with the user interface of Windows
95. It is built from a staggering sixteen million lines of C and C++
code. The next version of Windows NT, Windows 2000, is
currently in beta and promises support for many new emerging
technologies. As previously noted, Windows NT 4.0 comes in
two flavors, Server and Workstation. NT Server is powerful and
versatile. It can be used for everything from a Local Area Network
file server to a full-fledged Internet server, providing mail, web, ftp
or any combination of TCP based services. Both NT Server and
Workstation can act as TCP/IP routers, should you ever need