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Windows NT for Power Macintosh

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Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#111

Post by meibo »

PlutoIsAPlanet wrote: post #105
bee_rider wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Android isn't in a similar boat, AOSP has full isolated Multi-User support that is realized through Unix users. You can create new users through Settings and they have their own home screen, apps and files.

Most vendors have this enabled now and things like work accounts/MDM use the same system.

https://source.android.com/docs/devices/admin/multi-user

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#112

Post by mycall »

sedatk wrote: post #91
badgersnake wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s the same codebase that was my point. Whether it’s still called Windows NT or whether that name died in the 90s can probably be argued either way.

NT is still the name of the kernel. (ntoskrnl.exe)

I wonder if that is still true for Azure OS.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#113

Post by anyfoo »

PlutoIsAPlanet wrote: post #105
bee_rider wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

iOS barely uses that. Processes commonly run as “mobile” or “root”, but it does not matter very much. POSIX users and access permissions are archaic, and, in my opinion, don’t match with how almost any device is being used nowadays. iOS implements its own concepts through entitlements, containers, vaults, sandboxes etc. (Look up the “Apple Platform Security Guide” for details.)

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#114

Post by mycall »

fredoralive wrote: post #90
_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.

NT was designed to be portable, so the machine specific parts are cleanly separated, even on the same CPU. So if you port only those parts, the existing binaries for an architecture should work. The three bits are: 1) ARC boot firmware. NT was developed on non-x86 systems like i860 then MIPS, and ARC is the native boot firmware used (on x86 NTLDR emulated it prior to Vista). Similar to a PC BIOS / UEFI, and a PCI Pow…

I remember migrating whole Windows installations using image copies, but taking a fresh install's HAL files and copying them onto the images and volla, system transfer completed (device drivers would need reinstalling though).

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#115

Post by dmitrygr »

Writing a new NT HAL is a very impressive achievement. A tip of my hat to you, sir!

Docs are spotty at best, and I am sure many bugs aren’t known as existing HALs simply got lucky to not expose them.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#116

Post by Damogran6 »

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.

It allows applications to run in different priviledge contexts and allows you inherit privilidges on a network, off the top of my head.

Unless you _want_ your solitare game have the ability to enumerate your contacts and send mail.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#117

Post by EvanAnderson »

exe34 wrote: post #63
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think of it as a time when people became so entranced with the idea of the emerging object-oriented zeitgeist that they imagined that making things OO and component driven would just hand-wave towards success. People rushed to make infrastructure to support this model, and, well, it was no magic bullet. Complexity, fragility, and a lot of hard work remained.

the thing I'd like to see is for software to expose functional/"rest"-like interfaces. similar with websites and the content/user data. if you look at what accessibility software achieves by simply looking at the screen/hooking into the OS, now imagine any and all software could be connected like that. some of this functionality is now provided in individual silos, e.g. an email with an appointment in gmail can go in…

You would have enjoyed AREXX IPC on the Amiga.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARexx

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#118

Post by andrewf »

anyfoo wrote: post #107
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.

Apple bolted Carbon APIs onto NeXTSTEP/Mach, and Microsoft bolted the OS/2 Presentation Manager onto NT (https://virtuallyfun.com/2021/05/19/presentation-manager-for...), so I'm not sure why bolting Carbon onto NT would be unreasonable.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#119

Post by EvanAnderson »

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.

> Had Microsoft been serious with POSIX subsystem, and most likely I would never bothered with Linux for our UNIX assignments.

Arguably they did have a serious POSIX subsystem w/ the Interix (nee OpenNT) acquisition but they didn't do anything with it. I remember building GNU software under Interix and having a blast with it.

I still wish there was a distribution of NT that booted text -mode and had an Interix-based userland. That would be tons of fun.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#120

Post by pjmlp »

hylaride wrote: post #110
pjmlp wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ironically they had multiple iterations of it, with POSIX subsystem in NT, MKS Toolkit, Interix, Windows Services for UNIX, for various levels of "POSIX support", dropped everything on Windows Vista, only to create WSL out from Project Astoria ashes.

And before they got golden goose with MS-DOS/IBM deal, they were into the UNIX business with Xenix.

A few reasons why Linux would probably never taken off, had Microsoft stayed closer to their UNIX related projects.

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