27 Sep
2011
27 Sep
'11
8:21 a.m.
On 27 September 2011 03:44, TeoZ <teoz at neo.rr.com> wrote:
----- Original Message ----- From: "Glen Slick" <glen.slick at
gmail.com>
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic Posts Only" <cctech at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Monday, September 26, 2011 10:15 PM
Subject: Re: IBM Model M keyboard repair tip
NT 4.0 supported PowerPC, but the only Macs it would run on were based
on PReP, the PowerPC Reference Platform.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC_Reference_Platform
There were some Mac clones built to this, but they were due to appear
right about the time that Steve Jobs returned to Apple and killed off
the MacOS licensing programme. The best of the PReP clones were the
Motorola ones; as soon as Motorola learned of Jobs' return, they
killed the development programme.
This infuriated many - there were finished review machines
circulating. MacUser ruffled a lot of people's feathers by making the
Motorola Mac clone the magazine's Mac of the Year for, IIRC, 1996 or
1997.
On Sep 26, 2011 5:38 PM, "Fred Cisin"
<cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote:
As far as I know Microsoft skipped Mac PPC support which would dwarf all the
other systems sold in numbers.
When NT 4.x came out, MS marketing droids made a big deal out if being 99
44/100% portable C code, and how they were going to port it to EVERY
computer. ?(even the impossible ones)
Later, they changed their strategy more towards trying to achieve the
same
result by trying to eliminate the existence of anything that Windoze
wouldn't run on.
There were Alpha, MIPS, and PowerPC versions. What other CPU architectures
were out there at the time in any volume that would justify the effort to
support? MS tried supporting those other chips in
servers, don't think they supported workstations
There were PowerPC Windows NT Workstations, yes. I used an IBM demo model.
Not sure they ever reached actual volume sales.
(did they release MS Office
for any of those chips?).
No, but RISC NT included a Win16 emulator, so you could run Office 4 on them.
DEC included FX!32 with Alpha NT, a Win32 emulation layer, so DEC NT
3.x boxes could run Office 4 NT Edition. (Which I am still looking for
a copy of today.)
After NT for those other chips flopped they killed
support in later Win2000
alpha releases so Win2K release didn't support anything but x86.
It was earlier than that. I believe SP1 for NT4 was never released for
anything except X86.
There was also a SPARC NT but it was never released.
If NT had caught on for the Alpha (or any other chip)
AND that platform was
still around in quantities worth selling to, MS would still support them
just like MS still makes office for Mac. MS is out to make money and will
support anything that makes them major money.
Yep.
But the platform bombed.
I suspect the same may happen with Win8 for ARM: no Win32 support, x86
apps won't run, so it will bomb. I'd be happy to be wrong, in a way.
--
Liam Proven ? Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven
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