NT-based
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
-
Also see Architecture of Windows NT
In Microsoft Windows operating systems, the term NT-based describes the architecture of the operating system. NT-based means that the operating system is running standalone, whereas an MS-DOS based operating system, such as Windows 98, has MS-DOS running "underneath" the system. Because of this difference, some experts do not refer to MS-DOS based versions of Windows (from Windows 1.0 to Windows Me) as operating systems, but merely as "programs". This is because Windows is an application that is started from the MS-DOS environment, and Windows cannot run if MS-DOS is not also present and running.
[edit] Early Versions of Windows
The first version of Microsoft Windows, Windows 1.0, was simply an add-on for MS-DOS. Users could start Windows at the command line by running the win.com application. This shows that Windows was not a true operating system, just simply a program. The program could be stopped at any time without having to shut down the computer, because MS-DOS was still running.
[edit] Windows NT
To solve this issue, Microsoft released the first Windows NT operating system, Windows NT 3.1, in 1993. The goal of NT was to write an operating system basically from scratch and to be completely separate from MS-DOS. The NT codebase proved to be very reliable because of its stability [citation needed], and went on to be the foundation for many popular operating systems including Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Vista.