The letters were dropped from the names of releases from Windows 2000 and later, though Microsoft described that product as being 'Built on NT Technology'. A 1998 question-and-answer (Q&A) session with Bill Gates revealed that the letters were previously expanded to 'New Technology' but no longer carry any specific meaning. One of the original NT developers, Mark Lucovsky, states that the name was taken from the original target processor-the Intel i860, code-named N10 ('N-Ten'). 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.

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, MS-DOS, OS/2, Windows 3.1xĭepending 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

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