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Windows NT for Power Macintosh

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Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#101

Post by hylaride »

postmodest wrote: post #70
faefox wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'd give for a glimpse of the timeline where Apple bought Be instead of NeXT.

I suspect that without Jobs, Apple is dead by 2002. Turned into an arm of, like, RIM. Then Google comes out with the Android phone and it's all over for everyone including Microsoft.

I suspect if Apple and NeXT never "merged", the phone market would be RIM vs (a very different) Android, but we'd be worse off.

Blackberries were OK at the time, but my god RIM was so culturally conservative and Google at the time had no design sense that we'd probably be 10 years behind where we are now - and if we even had software keyboards they'd be terrible.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#102

Post by sumtechguy »

temac wrote: post #83
nullindividual wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NT4 was developed for PowerPC architectures (and MIPS, Alpha). A large portion of the NT4 source code was leaked [0]. I'm not saying the author used the NT4 source code in any fashion, but I would imagine using such source would make life much easier to accomplish this task. Or the author clean room reversed engineered the bootloader. Or there is enough information out there to forgo the need for any internal knowled…

Nt has a dynamic HAL layer to adapt it to platforms. I'm not sure if it was publicly documented, but in any case yes the source code leak don't harm that kind of port, even if you "just" have to write a HAL.

The current PE exe format supports it. As well as a few Alpha, a few ARM formats, a few MIPS format, Itanium and of course x86. The big part would be finding a compiler that spits out the right code. The preceding NE format also did a few variations.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#103

Post by bee_rider »

pavlov wrote: post #81
Damogran6 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I LOVE LOVE LOVED BeOS. It resonated with me and it was a great experience...it wasn't multiuser and didn't have some stuff that I forget, but seemed necessary for a system to have long-term success. But mam did it cut out the cruft and wring out ALL of the HP of the hardware of the time.

Why was multiuser so important? Apple’s most successful operating system in the Jobs 2.0 era isn’t multiuser either. BeOS would have been a fine foundation for smartphones and tablets. But of course it’s an open question whether Apple could have got that far in the 2000s without the return of Jobs. I suspect the company would have been acquired or merged with some unsuitable suitor like Sun.

I agree that iOS isn’t multi-user in any real, like, multiple user accounts intended to be used by real people sense.

I wonder, though, it is based on MacOS somehow, right? Which is based on BSD. Could there be some left over multi-user plumbing sticking around in a technical sense?

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#104

Post by icedchai »

lizknope wrote: post #74
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AIX isn't exactly a desktop OS. If so, only artificially; AIX was born on a workstation and seems to still support running a graphical desktop environment.

AIX was the first Unix I ever used in 1991 on an IBM RT with the ROMP CPU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RT_PC I wanted one on my desktop so bad. DOS/Win3.1 PCs were just so bad to me. Then I saw SunOS and really just wanted any Unix system on my desk. I bought a PC in 1994 just to install Linux.

I had one of these back in the early 90's, bought used, of course. It was running AIX 2.x. I moved on to Linux pretty quick.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#105

Post by PlutoIsAPlanet »

bee_rider wrote: post #103
pavlov wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why was multiuser so important? Apple’s most successful operating system in the Jobs 2.0 era isn’t multiuser either. BeOS would have been a fine foundation for smartphones and tablets. But of course it’s an open question whether Apple could have got that far in the 2000s without the return of Jobs. I suspect the company would have been acquired or merged with some unsuitable suitor like Sun.

I agree that iOS isn’t multi-user in any real, like, multiple user accounts intended to be used by real people sense. I wonder, though, it is based on MacOS somehow, right? Which is based on BSD. Could there be some left over multi-user plumbing sticking around in a technical sense?

Yes, iOS still uses users in the technical "Unix" sense, they're just not mapped to actual physical users, but instead to various services.

Android is in a similar boat. They're still an important way to manage filesystem access of programs.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#106

Post by nrr »

alsetmusic wrote: post #40
mepian wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did end up releasing salvageable bits and pieces of Copland as Mac OS 8.

I saw Copland at MacWorld Expo Boston at Apple’s booth. It kernel panicked. We didn’t get to use it. But wow do I remember how exciting it was the first time I read about it in MacUser magazine. Basically some GUI mockups and promises of cool under-the-hood improvements, possibly the first time I was excited about future computing. Thank goodness they bought NeXT instead. They had no ability to manage projects at sca…

"Too bad TimApple has no sense of how to do anything other than chase growth …" I feel like this is more emblematic of the wider industry trend than Apple's own strategy that they chose to impose on us.

The focus shifted very hard over the past 15-20 years from selling people new and novel gadgets and software to turning us ordinary folks into "monthly active users." Personal computing got a lot less personal, and Apple leaned into it to stay relevant.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#107

Post by anyfoo »

stahi wrote: post #22

Nostalgia reminds me of this: https://lowendmac.com/2014/next-openstep-and-the-triumphant-... Amelio and the rest of his senior staff began searching for a way out. They needed a new operating system to buoy their attempts to compete with the Wintel juggernaut. The same search had taken place several times before, but now the company was desperate. Limited Options Ultimately the list of possible targets was narrowed…

> License Windows NT from Microsoft and bolt a Mac-like interface onto it.

Gosh, am I glad that that didn't happen. I wonder how serious of an option that really was, it seems wildly out of place compared to the other propositions, which are all reasonable.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#108

Post by hylaride »

nullindividual wrote: post #73
_yb2s wrote: post #68

Can someone explain the context here? Surely NT is closed source and was never developed for macs, what actually is this? And what are the chances you can get software for it? Presumably most NT software was compiled for Intel only and closed source.

NT4 was developed for PowerPC architectures (and MIPS, Alpha). A large portion of the NT4 source code was leaked [0]. I'm not saying the author used the NT4 source code in any fashion, but I would imagine using such source would make life much easier to accomplish this task. Or the author clean room reversed engineered the bootloader. Or there is enough information out there to forgo the need for any internal knowled…

Yeah, I think the only commercial OEM releases of NT that got sold were x86 and Alpha, though there was support for a handful of specific MIPS and PPC machines, I don't think there were any OEM sales of them with it. I do know that only x86 and Alpha had all the service packs released. There were also at one time internal MS builds on Sparc, but that didn't last long. Alpha did have some pre-release builds of windows 2000 that went out, but there was no final release.

A fun fact is that because of where he worked at the time was a DEC shop, the creator of PuTTY originally created it because he got an alpha windows machine and there was no compatible terminal emulator for alpha NT. He supported alpha builds well into the 2000s and IIRC only dropped it as the machine he was using still for builds finally died.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#109

Post by [deleted] »

runjake wrote: post #24

It's been mentioned here before, but Dave Plummer's YouTube interview[1] with Dave Cutler[2] (NT lead architect) is a must-watch with never revealed before history about Windows NT. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxmZPMg7vIs&list=PLF2KJ6Gy3c... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Cutler

[deleted]

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#110

Post by hylaride »

pjmlp wrote: post #88
pwenzel wrote: post #53

Man, I loved Windows NT back in the day. It was light enough that I could run it on fairly low end late-90s hardware, and it was substantially more stable than Windows 95.

Had Microsoft been serious with POSIX subsystem, and most likely I would never bothered with Linux for our UNIX assignments. Instead I dual booted between both of them.

It's a shame. NT did support POSIX, but it was in practice designed to make it easier to port UNIX apps. At co-op job I had back in the day (~2000), I had to fight with Veritas' backup software on NT that wrote to tapes. I don't recall what it was (a device mapping to the drive maybe?), but you could see the UNIX foundations of the software.
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