Obects Handles and Reference Counts

Object Manager

Windows was written in C, which doesn't have a notion of "objects". Early Windows had its own Object Manager, which was responsible for defining object types, naming objects, handling handles for users etc.

For example, there were objects for threads, processes, files, semaphores, etc.

Each object had a handle count, the number of handles the user has to the object, and the ref count, the number of references to the object within the kernel (which also includes handles).