Questions tagged [windows-nt]

Windows NT is a family of commercial operating systems developed by Microsoft based on the Windows NT kernel.

The NT kernel is used in both client products, such as Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP, Windows 7, and Windows 8, as well as server products, such as Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008 R2, and Windows Server 2012. The NT kernel is also occasionally found in embedded products as Windows Embedded, or more recently, Windows Phone 8. The initial public release of Windows NT was on Windows NT 3.1 in 1993.

Current Microsoft Windows operating system families based on Windows NT include Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, and Windows Server 2012.

The Windows NT kernel is most often associated with the x86 and x86_64 architectures but has also historically run on architectures such as MIPS, PowerPC, Itanium (last supported on Windows Server 2008), and Alpha. Modern-day versions Windows NT exist for the x86, x86_64, and ARM architectures.

While much of the Windows NT operating system family is closed-source, some of it (including much of the kernel) is available under shared-source licensing (including academic/research use, as well as technical troubleshooting use).

Windows NT is structured differently than most Unix operating systems; some of it is inspired by the architecture of OpenVMS, while many other aspects of Windows NT are inspired by the requirements of backward compatibility.

The Windows Internals series, published by Microsoft Press, is an excellent reference to the architecture of modern Windows NT.

While the most visible aspect of Windows NT is the Win32 subsystem, which exposes the Windows API, other subsystems can be deployed on the Windows NT kernel as well, including a POSIX subsystem, commonly referred to as Subsystem for Unix Applications or Services for Unix. Historically, console-based OS/2 applications were also supported as another subsystem running on the Windows NT kernel.

See also: windows