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Windows NT for Power Macintosh

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81–90 of 223 posts

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#81
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#82
post #45

This is one of those things that I’d have nerdy arguments about with my nerdy friends in middle school.

Dude, shut up, the Amiga is totally better. Cooperative multitasking is lame. Have you seen HAM mode??

No, Amiga sucks, it can’t even run UNIX! Do you even know what it is? My dad uses it for work.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#83
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…

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.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#84
post #81

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.

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.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#85
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…

Isn't this just drivers and a HAL? Microsoft built the OS in a way so that such ports would be possible so there should be some API documentation out there. The question is how complete it is because everybody just used the MS provided HAL.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#86
post #31
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.

Assuming Apple would still be successful, and not close shop.

It would have settled C++ as the main systems language on desktop OSes, between Windows, and Mac Be OS.

Objective-C would have died, and Swift would never come to be.

Clang and LLVM probably would never had gotten Apple's sponsorship.

POSIX would have died on the desktop, as Be OS like other non UNIX OSes wasn't that keen in being UNIX like.

There wouldn't be a flock of Linux and BSD developers rushing out to buy Apple hardware, instead of sponsoring OEMs shipping PCs with those distributons.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#87
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Isn't that the SmallTalk model, but everyone decided to use C++ instead?

Not everyone, IBM OS/2 SOM had support for Smalltalk, C and C++.

Smalltalk was OS/2's .NET, so to speak.

Unfortunately it all died alongside OS/2, followed by IBM's pivot to Java.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#88
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.

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#89
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude, shut up, the Amiga is totally better. Cooperative multitasking is lame. Have you seen HAM mode??

No, Amiga sucks, it can’t even run UNIX! Do you even know what it is? My dad uses it for work.

Depends on what one considers UNIX.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Unix

Re: Windows NT for Power Macintosh

#90
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 PowerMac would use OpenFirmware. As well as providing an ARC compatible environment that loads over OpenFirmware, this project seems to does some fun so the boot firmware can pretend there's a storage device so that driver "floppies" can be loaded during the initial stages of setup. (ie an F6 disc)

2) A HAL. The main NTOSKRNL is hardware agnostic, so the idea is that there's one binary for each CPU architecture. But the kernel needs to interface with actual timers, busses etc., so the interface code is in HAL.DLL and the appropriate one is copied by setup. (For example see https://www.geoffchappell.com/studies/windows/km/hal/history... for a list of x86-32 ones in older versions of windows, with various HALs for NEC PC-98, IBM MCA, various early multiprocessing systems, nowadays there's just one AMD64 one that's mostly in the kernel itself). So the main kernel in unaltered, and halgoss handles the Mac specific stuff.

3) Device drivers. Once NT is up and running it does need actual drivers.

The specs for 1) are known, so can presumably be emulated, and I guess there's a DDK for 3) (or it can be deduced from another DDK), I guess 2) is probably the one that would need the most insider knowledge, I'm not sure if the leaked NT sources go down to that level as I've never looked at them.

As for compatibility, 32 bit PowerPC Win32 binaries, 16 bit x86 Win16 binaries, and whatever x86 DOS stuff will run in an NT4 DOS box. No x86 Win32, only Alpha had an emulator for Win32 x86 stuff (until ARM stuff).

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