Windows NT

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Windows NT Trademark An operating system with a graphical user interface, released by Microsoft in 1993. A later version of Windows, sometimes referred to as simply NT (NT stands for new technology). It comes in standard and server versions, and is particularly aimed at the file-server market. Versions of Windows prior to Windows 95 ran over MS-DOS as the underlying operating environment. Although the non-NT versions of Windows largely concealed many of the innate limitations of MS-DOS, they could not fully exploit some of the hardware advances in the later versions of the Intel architecture, such as wider address and data buses. Windows NT overcomes this by embedding the basic operating system directly into the Windows product. Another major difference between Windows NT and its predecessors is the appearance of versions running on non-Intel processors, such as Digital's Alpha.