Windows NT 4.0

Windows NT 4.0 is a preemptive, graphical and business-oriented operating system designed to work with either uniprocessor or symmetric multi-processor computers. It is the fourth release of Microsoft's Windows NT line of operating systems and was released to manufacturing on July 29, 1996. It is a 32-bit Windows system available in both workstation and server editions with a graphical environment similar to that of Windows 95. The "NT" designation in the product's title initially stood for "New Technology" according to Microsoft's then-CEO Bill Gates, but now no longer has any specific meaning. Windows NT 4.0 was succeeded by Windows 2000 in February 2000. Windows NT 4.0 is classified as a hybrid kernel operating system.
While providing greater stability than Windows 95, it was also 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-based versions, including Windows 95, 98, 98SE, and Me. The trade-off is that writing to the APIs rather than hardware directly requires much more work be done by the computer and so hardware intensive applications such as games run much slower. While many programs written for the Win32 API will run on both Windows 95 and Windows NT, the majority of 3D games will not, due in part to NT 4.0 having limited support for DirectX.
Windows NT 4.0 is also less user-friendly than Windows 95 when it comes to certain maintenance and management tasks; there is, for instance, no device management overview of the PC's hardware.
The dichotomy between the NT and "9x" lines of Windows ended with the arrival of Windows XP, by which time the gaming APIs—such as OpenGL 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 the last major release of NT to support the Alpha, MIPS or PowerPC CPU architectures. Windows NT 4.0 was rendered obsolete with the advent of Windows 2000 but is still (as of 2005) in widespread use despite Microsoft's many efforts to persuade customers to upgrade to more recent versions. It was also the last release in the Windows NT line to use the "Windows NT" name. NT 4.0 is the last Windows NT Server OS to use the now discontinued BackOffice feature.