13 May
2013
13 May
'13
1:06 p.m.
On 5/13/13 1:27 PM, Cory Smelosky wrote:
On Mon, 13 May 2013, Dave McGuire wrote:
OS/2 for the PPC wasn't written to run on just any PPC hardware. It was
written to run on the hardware that met the standard that IBM, Apple and
Motorola setup, CHRP (for Common Hardware Reference Platform). This was
supposed to be the RISC platform that would crush the Wintel monopoly.
They created a whole new company named Taligent to work on the object
oriented operating system for this platform. Does anyone remember "Pink"
which was to be the base platform OS that could run multiple flavors of
operating systems? I don't think Apple ever released any hardware that met
the standard and IBM only released a couple of desktops and 2 models of
Thinkpads. Apple abandoned the project and eventually the PPC completely,
then Motorola bailed on Taligent and finally IBM kicked a very poor version
of OS/2 for the Power PC out the door just to say they did and closed the
whole project down. Taligent was absorbed into IBM. Rumor was IBM sank
over $500 million into the whole thing (hardware and software development),
back when that was still a lot of money. Supposedly some of the technology
they developed for OS/2PPC was incorporated into OS/2 Warp4, but by then
(1996) IBM wasn't promoting its own operating system any more and were
discouraging new sales and encouraging existing OS/2 users to switch to NT.
Mark
--
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Investigation, 1938
On 05/13/2013 11:03 AM, David Riley wrote:
There were definitely quite a few PPC-based macs. The XBox 360 is
PPC-based and the playstation 3 is (I think) POWER-based...might be PPC
though. So yes. I'd think most people would know it's a success.
On May 13, 2013, at 7:45 AM, Holger Veit wrote:
I don't think that's what the OP meant. I really don't think anyone is
unaware that the PPC (and POWER) is a rather substantial commercial success.
Not having seen the PPC source, but the
86/286/386 monster of
OS/2-kernel source (3.x), I can only agree. I consider it almost
impossible, without a complete rewrite and then only - as in the PPC
implementation - with largely different APIs to port this thing to
anything else, including PDP-11. Given the 386 ring architecture, it
would be more likely to transfer a look-alike to a VAX, but not to a
PDP with MMU. But even then; the question is: what benefit would there
be? DEC systems were already a dying platform at the time of OS/2, and
lack of any compatibility to the original x86-based system would gain
nothing. Even the PPC was not a success, not only because of the
obscure CHRP architecture no other vendor used, but also because of the
lack of killer application or migration path. Apple those days did it
better in providing an emulator to run older 68K apps on the PPC.
I dunno, I think the PPC was a success, just not as much on the desktop.
There are LOADS of PowerPCs running high-end embedded stuff in cars and
telecom systems, and all three of the previous generation of game
consoles used a PowerPC of some sort as the CPU.