technologies. As previously noted, Windows NT 4.0 comes in two flavors, Server and Workstation. NT Server is powerful and versatile. It can be used for everything from a Local Area Network file server to a full-fledged Internet server, providing mail, web, ftp or any combination of TCP based services. Both NT Server and Workstation can act as TCP/IP routers, should you ever need them to do so. NT Workstation is a powerful 32-bit desktop operating system that acts as the perfect client companion to NT Server. It is also an excellent stand-alone OS. Windows NT is backwards compatible with the vast majority of PC software, 16 and 32 bit. It does not allow software to make direct calls to system hardware (often using assembly langauge), which is the reason why some games will refuse to run on it. The major features of Windows NT: Portability Windows NT was written almost entirely in C, which is a language that is easily moved from platform to platform. Microsoft isolated the part of the operating system that had to be written for specific hardware in something called the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL). When Microsoft wanted to move NT to different platforms, all they had to do was recompile the source code for the new hardware and create a new Hardware Abstraction Layer. Windows NT will run on the Intel x86 architecture, the MIPS RISC architecture, Digital Alpha, and Motorola PowerPC RISC. As an interesting note, Windows 2000 will only run on the x86 and Digital Alpha platforms. Pre-Emptive Multitasking Multitasking al...
