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Windows NT for Power Macintosh

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Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#131

Post by pjmlp »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #130
pjmlp wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agreed, that is what happens when Linux syscalls are more relevant than regular UNIX.

See the usual complains about macOS not being Linux, from people that probably should be supporting Linux OEMs instead of buying Apple laptops.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#132

Post by temac »

snakeyjake wrote: post #124
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.

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 us…

The C++ API bound forever to the gcc 2.95 ABI IIRC was also an "interesting" choice. Sure with success they would certainly have engineered a way forward, out of necessity, but if I would have had to give my opinion about that for Apple at the time...

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#133

Post by amelgares »

_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.

The Xbox 360 was PowerPC running a variant of the Windows 2000 (NT) OS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360_technical_specificati...

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#135

Post by pavlov »

Damogran6 wrote: post #116
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.

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.

macOS and iOS use a completely different mechanism to ensure a game doesn’t read my contacts or make network requests. It has nothing to do with Unix-style users.

They could have built that on top of BeOS just as well as on NextStep.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#136

Post by vt240 »

smm11 wrote: post #46
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…

I still think Solaris/Mac stood a chance; the hardware would have been miles better than anything else.

The best 68k Mac I ever had was MAE in Solaris 9 on my SunBlade 2500. Fully patched up Solaris 9 had all the filesystem and disk i/o improvements, and none of the libc changes that happened in 10 which broke all backwards compatibility.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#137

Post by aswanson »

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.

Hard to argue with that. Still remember a co-intern telling me "Steve Jobs returned to Apple!" and just shrugging.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#138

Post by temac »

nullindividual wrote: post #36
mepian wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Similar story to Cairo with Microsoft [0]. Both visionary, both only partial successes. WinFS :-( [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_(operating_system)

It's funny how cancelled projects are somehow making people almost more "nostalgic" than projects that actually shipped. One of the reason may be that cancelled projects don't need to be completed, to ship with a reasonably good quality, to have an easy to use interface, to be sustainable for a long enough period of time, etc.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#139

Post by stg24 »

cnasc wrote: post #128
andrewf wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It might have been necessary to stick with the NT 3.51 codebase. I think they broke the clean separation of the GUI from the rest of the OS in 4.0, which was launched that year, for performance reasons.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#140

Post by temac »

pjmlp wrote: post #120
hylaride wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Microsof…

There was actually "SUA" after "SFU", only removed in Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2.
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