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Windows NT for Power Macintosh

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41–50 of 223 posts

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#41
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I can’t think of a better acqui-hire than NeXT + Steve Jobs

You mean when NeXT bought Apple and forced Apple to finance the deal.

A.K.A. that time when Steve Jobs acqui-hired Apple.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#43
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.

https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStep

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#44
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I can’t think of a better acqui-hire than NeXT + Steve Jobs

For sure, it was pretty clearly the right call at the time and objectively so with the benefit of hindsight. But BeOS was just too good to be allowed (forced, really) to die on the vine the way that it did.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#46
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.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#47

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.

Just like NT4 Server :-) Intended use vs. potential use. And yeah, NT4 Server was just NT4 Workstation with some registry fiddly bits flipped.

Right; NT was and is likewise quite capable of being a desktop or server OS, the difference is that MS actually pushed that and NT 10.0 is still actively used in both contexts.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#48
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…

Yep, I used to run Apple's (maybe it was still NeXT at the time?) Mail app on Windows NT, I can't recall where I got it, maybe it was part of some goodies included with WebObjects?

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#49
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)

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.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#50

Fascinating work. The ARC std https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARC_(specification) was used to boot the Dec Alpha Windows machines, along w/ MIPS, etc. Anyone know of other open source variants of that in the wild? At intel in 1998 the original efi spec was modeled on & inspired by Arc. The Intel boot initiative (IBI) in fact looked mostly like Arc. EFI (now UEFI) is sort of Arc + installable GUID-based interfaces (aka…

My roommate's Alpha had the SRM firmware which he used to boot NetBSD. ARC would boot NT but SRM could not.

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

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