WHY WINDOWS NT?
by Helen Custer, Inside Windows NT In both the CISC (complex instruction set computers) and RISC (reduced instruction set computers) arenas, promising technologies have emerged rapidly. Microsoft saw that in order to exploit these and other hardware advances, it needed to produce an operating system for the 1990s – one that was portable and able to move easily from one hardware platform to another. Although Microsoft and IBM created the OS/2 operating system in the 1980s, Microsoft recognized that the system had many shortcomings, the most obvious being that OS/2 is not portable. It was written in assembly language to run on single-processor, Intel 80286 computers. Rather than try to overhaul the OS/2 system software, Microsoft decided to build a new, portable operating system from the ground up. Return to Table of Contents THE DIGITAL VIDEO REVOLUTION Microsoft TechNet CD SUMMARY The digital revolution makes video a practical technology for personal computers. To store, manage and tra
