Windows NT is the line of operating systems Microsoft built as a thoroughly modern, fully 32-bit foundation, separate from the MS-DOS-based consumer Windows of the early 1990s. A 1998 Microsoft press release records that the company formed the NT development team in 1988 “with the goal of developing a thoroughly modern, fully 32-bit, robust, multipurpose operating system.”
The architecture set NT apart from earlier Microsoft systems. The same press release describes its first products as featuring “a new micro-kernel operating system architecture, pre-emptive multitasking scheduler, the fault-tolerant file system of Windows NT, multiprocessor support, the 32-bit Windows-based architecture, powerful domain-level security, file and print services, and more.” NT was also designed to be portable across processor families rather than tied to a single chip.
The project was led by Dave Cutler, who had previously led the VMS operating system at Digital Equipment Corporation. Microsoft’s feature on Cutler describes Windows NT 3.1 shipping on July 27, 1993, and “becoming the foundation for all major Windows versions since.”
That foundation has proved durable. The NT kernel and design have carried forward through Windows 2000, Windows XP, and every later release, so the enterprise-grade system Cutler’s team built in the early 1990s still sits underneath the Windows that runs on desktops and servers today.