If I'm not mistaken, the Win32 API is actually a subsystem to the NT kernel. You can call the kernel itself a layer below with functions beginning with 'nt*'.

If I'm not mistaken, the Win32 API is actually a subsystem to the NT kernel. You can call the kernel itself a layer below with functions beginning with 'nt*'. Hardware is actually mapped as an object namespace, which is presented to the user as the drive letters. This was exposed with Windows XP booting in safe mode; during the boot process it would print file paths as object paths, not drive paths. Much as I'm more in the *nix way now, there's plenty of curiosities to explore and tinker in Windows.