Windows NT for Power Macintosh • Hacker News Board

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#121

Post by pjmlp » Fri, Jul 12, 2024, 7:37 PM UTC

EvanAnderson wrote: post #119

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.

> 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…

Nowadays that would be Windows Server Core with WSL, which unfortunely isn't yet supported.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#122

Post by pjmlp » Fri, Jul 12, 2024, 7:46 PM UTC

hylaride wrote: post #101

postmodest wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Outside US, it would keep being all about J2ME, Symbian, Windows CE/Pocket PC, Bada OS.

Which keep being forgotten, in these kind of discussions.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#123

Post by pjmlp » Fri, Jul 12, 2024, 7:47 PM UTC

GeekyBear wrote: post #43

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…

Next's APIs were also ported to run on top of Windows NT and Sun's Solaris. In addition, the entire NextStep OS ran bare metal on several CPU architectures. > originally ran only on NeXT's Motorola 68k-based workstations and that was then ported to run on 32-bit Intel x86-based "IBM-compatible" personal computers, PA-RISC-based workstations from Hewlett-Packard, and SPARC-based workstations from Sun Microsystems. htt…

It were those ports to Sun's Solaris, that influenced Java's design and later on Java EE as well.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#124

Post by snakeyjake » Fri, Jul 12, 2024, 7:48 PM UTC

faefox wrote: post #31

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…

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

Apple would have died.

I love BeOS.

I love BeOS more than you.

I love BeOS more than Jean-Louis Gassée.

BeOS wasn't ready. I was there I used BeOS as my daily driver on a maxxed-out Power Macintosh 6400. I have, today, that machine still running BeOS. I also have a second dual-PII running BeOS.

BeOS wasn't ready.

Apple was making a decision in 1996 for a deal that had to be struck and struck fast (1997). I started using BeOS in 1997 with one of the first Power Macintosh releases.

Those days (my days) it wasn't ready-- you had to pile patch on top of patch on top of community fix on top of some set of drivers some dude in Boise made in order to get things functional. I spent more time browsing BeOS listservs and download sites fixing things (at 56k) than using it.

Everyone is remembering fondly the R4.5/R5 days in late 1999. Three years after the December 1996 announcement of the NeXT acquisition. By then BeOS was... better. It was running on PCs and had a much larger user community. In 1996/7? Just a handful of BeBox owners and Mac users dumb enough (me) to try it.

Management would have been professionally negligent to choose it over NeXTStep.

In 1996, when Apple was up against the wall, NeXTStep was almost ten years old. All they had to do was buy the company, port it to PPC, and change some copyright messages and icons around. Took about two years.

BeOS would have required way more time, money, and expertise.

BeOS had no multi-user, no security (at all), an "aspirational" level of posix compliance, drivers that were a disaster, a network stack specifically designed to frustrate you, and no "companies that actually matter and no Gobe doesn't count" application support.

I get it. It was pretty. It was fast. French electro DJs loved it because it was low latency, and some audio tools were ported to it.

A userbase of French electro DJs doesn't pay the bills.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#125

Post by pjmlp » Fri, Jul 12, 2024, 7:57 PM UTC

mycall wrote: post #112

sedatk wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I wonder if that is still true for Azure OS.

Kind of,

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-os-platform-b...

However plenty of Azure infrastructure uses Linux as well,

https://github.com/microsoft/azurelinux

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/sonic-the-networking-...

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#126

Post by rezmason » Fri, Jul 12, 2024, 8:01 PM UTC

TickleSteve wrote: post #7

fny wrote: post #3

Very, very cool, and I can't wait to relive giving up all my DOS games!

This isnt an x86 emulator that can run a DOS box, this is NT running natively on PPC. So... no DOS games I'm afraid.

I wonder what software is available NT4 on a Power Macintosh.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#127

Post by Lammy » Fri, Jul 12, 2024, 8:03 PM UTC

Neat. I am totally going to try this on one of my spare Blue&White G3s.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#128

Post by cnasc » Fri, Jul 12, 2024, 8:10 PM UTC

andrewf wrote: post #118

anyfoo wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

IIRC from reading Showstopper, NT was intended to afford that sort of different frontend swapping. It just happened that Windows became the primary focus in the end.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#129

Post by kbolino » Fri, Jul 12, 2024, 8:10 PM UTC

xattt wrote: post #84

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.

Multi-user would have likely been bolted on one way or another at some point, as had happened when other OSes gained fundamental new features.

Was any operating system actually able to go from single-user to multi-user so easily? Windows NT and OS X were totally rewritten from the ground up relative to their single-user predecessors Windows 9x and classic Mac OS.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#130

Post by EvanAnderson » Fri, Jul 12, 2024, 8:12 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #121

EvanAnderson wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Nowadays that would be Windows Server Core with WSL, which unfortunely isn't yet supported.

Interix was so much more orthogonal to the design of NT-- so much more elegant. WSLv1 was more elegant than WSLv2. WSLv2 feels like a minor step up from just running a Linux VM.