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.

It has been suggested that Dave Cutler intended the initialism 'WNT' as a play on VMS, incrementing each letter by one. 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 latest versions support x86 (including IA-32 and 圆4) and ARM. Initially, it supported several instruction set architectures, including IA-32, MIPS, and DEC Alpha support for PowerPC, Itanium, 圆4, and ARM were added later. It is a multi-architecture operating system. NT was the first purely 32-bit version of Windows, whereas its consumer-oriented counterparts, Windows 3.1x and Windows 9x, were 16-bit/32-bit hybrids. In fact, NT was a trademark of Northern Telecom (later Nortel) at the time, which Microsoft was forced to acknowledge on the product packaging. Starting with Windows 2000, 'NT' was removed from the product name and is only included in the product version string along with several low-level places within the system.

'NT' was formerly expanded to 'New Technology' but no longer carries any specific meaning. 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. It was a commercially focused operating system intended to complement consumer versions of Windows that were based on MS-DOS (including Windows 1.0 through Windows 3.1x). The first version of Windows NT was Windows NT 3.1 and was produced for workstations and server computers. It is a processor-independent, multiprocessing and multi-user operating system.

Windows NT is a proprietary graphical operating system produced by Microsoft, the first version of which was released on July 27, 1993. RSX-11, VAXELN, OpenVMS, MICA, Mach (kernel)ĭepending on version, edition or customer choice: Trialware, commercial software, volume licensing, OEM-only, SaaS, S+S IA-32, x86-64, ARM and ARM64 (and historically Intel i860, DEC Alpha, Itanium, MIPS, and PowerPC) Windows Update, Windows Server Update Services Source-available (through Shared Source Initiative).

Windows nt 6.4