What NT Really Stands For

What "NT" Really Stands For

Mark Lucovsky, a former Distinguished Engineer (the most prestigious title for an engineer at Microsoft) in the Windows NT group, explains the term NT:

And then when we were bantering around names, we had N10 and New Technology. It worked both ways, so that's what NT really stood for the N10 chip and we could use it [or] double it as New Technology. But it's nothing more magical than that."

N10 was the code name for the Intel chipset (i860) that NT was originally targeted for. Thus, NT was a code name titled after another code name. I am not sure if the Windows marketing folks really planned on using NT for the product name. It is pretty rare that a code name at Microsoft is used for a product's final released name. Maybe because they tacked on Windows to NT and at the time of the first release, both terms were pretty popular in the computer world, they decided to keep the NT moniker, too.