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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).
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...
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,
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.
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.