During a trip to Microsoft's Redmond campus this week, I had the opportunity to meet with Mark Lucovsky, one of the original architects of NT. We had a long discussion about the development and evolution of NT, but one of the more fascinating tidbits he revealed was that NT does not, in fact, stand for "New Technology," as documented in books such as "Showstoppers" and "Inside Windows NT." Instead, the name comes from the earliest days of the product's development, when it was targeted at the Intel i860, a RISC processor. In those days, Intel's chip was behind schedule, so Microsoft had to use an i860 emulator called the N10. NT was so named because it worked on the "N-Ten." I'll have much more information from my meetings with Lucovsky and others involved with Windows Server in the days ahead.
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