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Jobs and the x86 OS market

Started by CFran, Sep 22 2005 12:11 AM

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3 replies to this topic

#1
CFran

Posted 22 September 2005 - 12:11 AM

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I found something quite interesting while reading some summary of the Apple timeline http://www.pegasus3d...c_timeline.html. It says this :

"# February 10 [1993]
: Jobs lays off 280 of his 530 NeXT employees on "Black Tuesday". Sells his hardware line to Canon, and tries to become a Microsoft-like company by concentrating only on the NeXTstep OS for the Intel x86 platform."

looks like he already tried conquering that market, leaving aside the hardware, to get beige-boxes to run his OS.

While I highly doubt that he would drop the Apple hardware as he did with the NeXT computers, all of a sudden i find it more likely that he may try to conquer again the x86 OS market, to try to concurence Microsoft on its territory.

I don't think that it will happen any time soon, but I wouldn't be surprised if a few years after the end of the transation, let's say around 2010, he would try to attack that market again.

Btw, I also read on this page that Microsoft deved Windows NT for PowerPC until 97.. wow. Is there any PPC copy of WWindows out there?

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#2
niteice

Posted 22 September 2005 - 01:53 AM

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Yeah, Windows NT had PowerPC versions until at least 4.0, it wouldn't surprise me if very early 2000 betas did as well. At any rate, it wouldn't install on a Mac, just some IBM workstations.

It should be pretty easy to obtain if you already know where to get a regular x86 copy of NT.

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#3
Guest: terry_*

Posted 22 September 2005 - 10:48 AM

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CFran, on Sep 22 2005, 12:11 AM, said:

looks like he already tried conquering that market, leaving aside the hardware, to get beige-boxes to run his OS.

Actually he didn't really try to 'conquer' that market. NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP for x86 were only niche products and clearly not targeted at a mass market. Remember, as these operating systems were so much ahead of their time and demanded for high-performance systems to run on, they were always quite picky about the hardware. And they weren't completely "concentrating only on the NeXTstep OS for the Intel x86 platform", either. While certainly HP PA-RISC support had been dropped with the last version of NeXTSTEP (3.3), OPENSTEP continued to run also on the Sun SPARC platform (and on the venerable, discontinued black m68k hardware, of course). Also don't forget their approaches to separate the APIs from the core OS in order to put them on top of other operating systems like Solaris and Windows NT.

CFran, on Sep 22 2005, 12:11 AM, said:

Btw, I also read on this page that Microsoft deved Windows NT for PowerPC until 97.. wow. Is there any PPC copy of WWindows out there?

Sure, Windows NT 3.1 (which grew out of Microsoft's OS/2 3.0 project, but this is a totally different story) ran on x86, DEC Alpha and MIPS R4x00 machines. Later on, with Windows NT 3.51, PPC support was added. Windows NT 4.0 continued to run on all the architectures mentioned above. I still have a bunch of fresh, factory-sealed install CDs including code for PowerPC machines lying around here, they look like that:

But due to a lack of software, Windows NT on non-x86 hardware wasn't a success story. Just the DEC Alpha version of NT4 remained relatively popular because it was the only one that was capable of executing 32-bit applications compiled for x86, which was realized through DEC's famous FX!32 emulation layer. All other version only had an 80286 emulation layer for backwards compatibility to old 16-bit code.

Btw, IIRC, the Apple PowerMac G5s Microsoft gave to XBOX360 game developers also run a Windows NT kernel.

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#4
Guest: terry_*

Posted 22 September 2005 - 02:56 PM

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niteice, on Sep 22 2005, 01:53 AM, said:

Yeah, Windows NT had PowerPC versions until at least 4.0, it wouldn't surprise me if very early 2000 betas did as well.

Nope, the PowerPC version had been cancelled long before, IIRC SP2 was the last service pack that got released for this platform. There was a port of W2K to DEC Alpha, however, which was developed up to the status of a release candidate, but it was pulled then and never made it to the market.