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If Windows Came to PPC, Would You Switch?
An anonymous reader asks: "This question was posted on Ask Slashdot about a week ago: 'If Mac OS X Came to x86, Would You Switch?' This makes me ask why not have Windows run on PowerPC? Windows/PPC would not necessarily have to run on Apple hardware, or at least not exclusively on it. I'm sure their friends at IBM and Motorola would be happy to provide chips to anyone that wanted to make computers to run this new OS. Microsoft could dust off the code from NT4/PPC, add some code from Virtual PC to get Windows/x86 compatibility, and have it up and running in about the same amount of time it would take Apple to get Mac OS X running on common Intel hardware." An additional question comes to mind, however: If Microsoft made this move, how would Intel react?
and have it up and running in about the same amount of time it would take Apple to get Mac OS X running on common Intel hardware
Apple has regular builds of it's code OS, Darwin, on both Intel and PPC hardware. This is available to anyone here.
It's been said that Apple still build all of their apps on Intel-based Darwin, therefore keeping an eye on portability, while giving them a chance to see where optimisation could break other platforms.
Apple had to change processor in the past and wants to keep it's options open, this time around. Besides, don't forget Mac OS X is basically a souped-up OpenStep, wich ran on both 68K, PPC and Intel hardware. (Oh yeah... Sun hardware too for a while).
The official explanation (take what you will) for the poor showing in the MIPS, Alpha, PPC race was that Microsoft was not doing those projects. MIPS, Dec, and IBM were given the opportunity to write their own ports of the architecture-specific elements of the Windows NT kernel. They did that. Then MIPS, Dec and IBM were responsible for making a viable product of those ports. They did not do anything with it. Microsoft wasn't obligated or even offering to market MIPS, Alpha, PPC varieties of Windows NT.
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Microsoft could dust off the code from NT4/PPC, add some code from Virtual PC to get Windows/x86 compatibility, and have it up and running in about the same amount of time it would take Apple to get Mac OS X running on common Intel hardware."
.NET has been created to solve? Same OS & Apps running on different platforms?
Isn't this what
Doh!
Mac fans try to talk about the "great" hardware you get with a Mac, however if you compare a $1,500 iMac G5 vs a $1,500 AlienWare box, there is no contest. The AlienWare box gives you far better hardware that out performs a Mac hands down. Note: I an not talking about the OS, just what you get hardware-wise for your money. Apple, just cannot compete with the x86 market on hardware because of the massive x86 volume.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
You would be correct if you qualified that by stating: there were no computers available to run NT/PPC for less than $5K. Many of which indeed had plastic cases, but the vast majority of which came from Intel (IIRC Netpower was flirting with a switch from MIPS to PPC, but that was so long ago I barely remember it). I do remember stacking the entire pile of PPC boxes in a closet once we got the letter from Microsoft that the Beta was ending (This would have been NT4 SP2 era).
You have to also remember that the Alpha, MIPS and PPC platforms were aimed at a much different market than the Intel boxes. The Pentiums of the day just weren't up to snuff (this started to change once the PII started the MHZ escalation from 300-500mhz), and things like the Integraph TDZ series hit the market.
But you were still talking $10K-$20K graphics workstations.
actually there was a PPC port of NT years ago. It was dropped beacause...the answer is no. No one will switch :-)
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
Windows at present is mostly based on the 32-bit Intel architecture. Microsoft did its worst dirty tricks in the last dying days of the segmented 16-bit architecture, using DOS dominance to get market share for its 32-bit attempt. It's going to have to chose between AMD-64 and Intel-64 anyway, or support both, and binary application developers will need to make the same choice, so I guess the submitter would argue that PPC-64 (which has been around longer) is a viable option. However, there's a big movement away from software that's tied down to one platform or another, which is good for Linux, Java, and all the other OS, hardware and software vendors, programmers, and users.
The limited adoption and big troubles implementing Wine suggests to me that there would be little interest in a Microsoft port of Windows to yet another architecture. Windows 95 was probably the most-memorable MS-Windows version ever, and yet Microsoft has had to fragment even that identity to keep up its sales, starting with that crazy desktop in XP. The claim that Windows has excellent backward compatibility is bogus, too; for instance, the copy of TeraTerm that I carry around on a floppy has never worked on any NT2k or later system I've touched, and the default installation of Microsoft Word can't read files created by any version of Microsoft Works. I could contiue this rant...
2 points:
1) the bondi blue iMac was *MOSTLY* based on CHRP, it had a few changes that made it only run Mac OS. it also had a lot in common with the PowerBook G3 of the era (Wallstreet)
2) the platform that CHRP morphed into wasn't PPCP, but PReP for for PowerPC Refernce Platform. you can still find hardware based on that to this day - see Amiga.
there were also some mac clones that had a little bit of CHRP or PReP in there heritage (they had RS-232 serial ports and PS/2 ports as well as ADB!) but as far as i know they still only ran the MacOS.
Don't call me back. Give me a call back. Bye. So yeah. But bye our, well, but alright we are on a shirt this chill.
Ever heard of the H.A.L.? Not the computer from the movie "2001", but the Hardware Abstraction Layer. It's what let NT run on x86, PPC, and MIPS. The HAL is still there in XP and W2K3, but they only have the x86 version available these days. If there was an economic reason to bring Windows to PPC, it would be fairly trivial to do so...
Carpe Cerevisi - Seize the Beer
Speaking as someone who was there, at the time, working on this stuff:
... well, I'll let you figure it out.
You are full of shit.
Cutler and a number of members of the original NT base team were deeply involved in VMS: true.
Code was stolen, appropriated, or otherwise taken from DEC in any way: utterly false.
An out of court settlement between DEC and Microsoft: fantasy.
How do I know this? I personally witnessed the original NT kernel code being written and checked in to the source tree.
At best, you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.
At worst,
There are a couple of errors in this. First of all, Cutler was never involved with the Alpha port of VMS. He was involved with initial development of VMS on the original VAX platform, but was working on Micah/Prism project before the Alpha era started.
Micah/Prism (one was the OS, the other was the hardware - I never can remember which was which) was a new OS/hardware combo that was intended to replace VAX/VMS. Eventually Micah/Prism was axed in favor of persuing VMS on Alpha/AXP. This move upset Cutler enough that it made him easy pickings to be recruited by Microsoft to head the development of OS/2 NT, the intended replacement of OS/2 which went on to become Windows NT.
It is the Micah/Prism code (plus overall aspects of its design), not VMS, that Cutler is alleged to have lifted for use in NT, although no one has ever admitted to this in any official capacity.
Since the OS for the Micah/Prism project was a from-scratch rewrite (borrowing a small number of internal design elements from its VMS ancestor) was still in its early stages when it was killed, still very immature and flawed. Had the VMS kernel formed the basis for NT, Microsoft would have had a robust, secure, and scalable server OS a decade ago, instead of being about 3/4 of the way there only now.
As DIGITAL splashed on its OpenVMS website for a few hours back in the late 90's (before being quietly yanked by management), "OpenVMS 7.0 is today what Microsoft wants NT 8.0 to be."
*** Quantum Mechanics: The Dreams of Which Stuff is Made ***
I don't really know where you get your information from, but a whole lot of it is simply incorrect.
"Windows NT" was originally a new design for OS/2, which Microsoft codenamed "NT" for "New Technology". When Microsoft dropped out of the OS/2 development effort, they went it on their own under their existing Windows brand, hence "Windows NT".
Usage of "NT" in the product name proved a bit problematic from the start, because "NT" was a registered trademark of Northern Telecom (now Nortel). Which is why every box of Windows NT sold has a disclaimer on the box stating that fact.
The dropping of the "NT" moniker was more of a marketing decision than anything else (I don't know if they were paying Nortel for the right to use "NT" or not, although this also could have been a factor).
NT was designed from the start to be a cross-platform operating system. Microsoft collected partners to handle various ports (much or the PPC port was actually written by IBM). At the time it was being released, the belief was that Intel had hit a ceiling, and that everyone was going to make a big move over to RISC-based architectures. Microsoft wanted to hedge their bets and be ready in the event the Intel-based system market crashed. Of course, it didn't, and the non-Intel NT's withered away.
Of course, it didn't help that the people who actually owned PPC, Alpha, and MIPS-based systems already had much better operating systems (AIX, OpenVMS, Irix, etc.) with a large number of available applications, whereas NT on these platforms had next to no available software, and was a poor and unproven OS (it took years for NT to gain any significant traction even on Intel systems).
It should be noted that OS/2 on the Power PC suffered a similar fate. IBM didn't have the cajones to push CHAP PPC systems, and only ever released OS/2 for PPC to a few selected customers they had a contractual obligation to release it to. They talked a big game about pushing Power PC systems on the desktop, but in the end made no effort to do so.
Yaz.
Microsoft has a minimalist port of Windows right now for the G5 Mac as a development environment for the new X Box. This is because IBM and Microsoft are developing a processor for the new XBox based on the POWER architecture which will be similar to the G5 used in the 64-bit Macs.
The reason it was dropped was that no one made CHRP boxes to run it on. IBM and Motorola had big plans for the PowerPC architecture when it was released. It was supposed to replace x86 as the commodity hardware of choice for OEMs. Anyone could build a CHRP box that would run NT4. Sadly, very few people did, and most of those that bought CHRP boxes used them for MacOS or UNIX of some kind, leaving no market for MS.
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I'm surprised your experience with NT on the Alpha was so dismal--mine is just the opposite. Rock-solid stability, blazing speed (on my PC164 motherboard with a 400mhz 21164a) compared to the x86 port of NT (remember, NT was developed first on the MIPS platform--and later ported to x86).
I run that same box as a dual-boot machine, running the beta 3 release of Windows 2000/alpha (yep, they released Windows 2000 beta for the Alpha, but killed the project right before the final release) and Linux. For a while, the Win2k/alpha box was my main desktop machine. I never had a problem running any i386 apps, from Office to Netris, on the Alpha since Win2k/alpha had fx!32 integrated into the system. (you'll recall that fx!32 was DEC's binary translator-cum-recompiler, which was a really ingenious little tool to recompile i386 binaries into native Alpha code).
My MIPS Magnum, with its little R4000PC and 128 megs of RAM, also runs NT 4.0 on occasion, although it spends most of its time in NetBSD. The MIPS Magnum was in fact based on the Jazz architecture, which Microsoft developed in-house specifically for writing NT. As mentioned, MS wrote NT for MIPS on this Jazz platform, and later ported it to i386, PowerPC, and Alpha. SUN and Intergraph also wrote a proof-of-concept port of NT to Sparc hardware, but that port was never released publicly.
The MIPS Magnum/Jazz was not a bad hardware architecture for the time, and impressive if only because it is the only hardware platform I'm aware of which Microsoft designed.