Windows NT Essay -- Computers Technology Operating System

Windows NT The history of Windows NT: The history of Windows NT goes back to the early 80's, 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 NT's "personality" on Microsoft's current Windows system, version 3.0, and not OS/2. In o... ... up retrieval. Windows NT utilizes SCSI disk drives to implement RAID. Increased Stability / Robustness over Windows 95/98 More attention was paid to the stability of Windows NT 4.0 when Microsoft was designing and coding it. It was essential that NT be very stable in order to be a viable alternative to UNIX as a desktop and server operating system. Windows 95 and 98 are notoriously unstable and not acceptable for very high performance hardware (multiple processors, Gigs of RAM), and high demand TCP/IP applications, such as that seen in high volume Internet servers. Blue screens of death are also few and far between compared to Windows 9x. So in summary, NT 4.0 is much more stable and reliable than Win9x due to how it was designed and due to its heritage, which is entirely different from Windows 9x.