Windows NT 4.0 Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
Microsoft brought Windows NT 4.0 onto the market in 1996. It is a 32 bit windows system available in workstation and server versions with a graphical environment similar to Windows 95. Whilst much more stable (a relative term with Windows) than Windows 95 it is also much less flexible from a desktop perspective. Much of the stability is gained by virtualising the hardware and having software applications access the system APIs rather than the hardware directly as was done in DOS and continued with windows 95 and on. The trade off is that writing to the APIs rather than the hardware directly requires much more work be done by the computer and so hardware intensive applications such as games run much more slowly. Whilst many programs written for the Win32 API will run on both Windows 95 and Windows NT, the majority of 3d games will not. The dichotomy between the NT and '9x' lines of windows arguably only ended with the arrival of Windows XP by which time the gaming APIs- such as Open GL- and DirectX had matured sufficiently to be more efficient to write for than common PC hardware and the hardware itself had become powerful enough to handle the API processing overhead acceptably.Windows NT 4.0 was rendered 'obsolete' with the advent of Windows 2000 but is still (2004) in widespread use despite Microsoft's many efforts to persuade customers to upgrade to more recent versions.
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