Requirements and Design Goals
The following requirements drove the specification of Windows NT back in 1989:
Provide a true 32-bit, preemptive, reentrant, virtual memory operating system
Run on multiple hardware architectures and platforms
Run and scale well on symmetric multiprocessing systems
Be a great distributed computing platform, both as a network client and as a server
Run most existing 16-bit MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows 3.1 applications
Meet government requirements for POSIX 1003.1 compliance
Meet government and industry requirements for operating system security
Be easily adaptable to the global market by supporting Unicode
To guide the thousands of decisions that had to be made to create a system that met these requirements, the Windows NT ...
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