So much so in fact, Microsoft developed NT 3.1 first on non-x86 architectures (i860 and MIPS), then later ported to x86, to ensure no x86 specific code made it in.
NT supported quite a few architectures:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Supported_platforms
"Windows NT 3.1 was released for Intel x86 PC compatible and PC-98 platforms, and for DEC Alpha and ARC-compliant MIPS platforms. Windows NT 3.51 added support for the PowerPC processor in 1995"...
NT is a pretty interesting bit of PC history, I can highly recommend the book "Show Stopper!" by G. Pascal Zachary that recounts its development, and also dives a bit into why making the OS portable across CPU architectures was so important to the team at the time.
Well, it is true, but Windows did run BE on the original MIPS R3000 platform. And only on the R3K[0]. The CPU architecture flag is still defined on modern Windows as IMAGE_FILE_MACHINE_R3000BE. There's an early test build of Win3.1 + GDI somewhere that runs on this platform.
The actual first release of WinNT 3.1 only supported MIPS R4000 and higher, I think. In little endian mode.
[0] I know the Xbox used a modified NT kernel, I've seen claims that the Xbox 360 also was, which would make it the second NT system to run big endian. Not familiar enough with sources better than wikipedia to trust that it actually was.
I remember demoing the machines to astonished clients by running a stupid number of Clock apps on the desktop without a hitch.
Fun times.
Things were so weird and wonderful back then. You could get GCC from Microsoft for Windows NT 3.1 for Alpha (crazy). And when Windows NT 4.0 came out there was the FX32 subsystem that ran X86 apps on Alpha (very similar to Apple Rosetta but much earlier).
I did not realize Canada was such a hotbed of Windows NT RISC.
Nintendo GameCube and Wii are also PowerPC based. And somebody managed to have them run Windows NT: https://github.com/Wack0/entii-for-workcubes
(Also, was the x86 emulation implemented in-house? I wouldn’t be surprised if some niche small company had a x86 emulator for PPC product that they could be paid to port.)
When OS/2 for PowerPC was set in motion, that Intel would “Make CISC Great Again” with the Pentium was far from clear.
Pentium shook that tree a bit, and Pentium II really razzle-dazzled it.
The Pentium introduced the idea of micro op codes though the Pentium Pro was the first chip to really run with it. The CISC x86 instructions were converted into simpler instructions internally. These micro op codes could be pipe-lined, executed in parallel, and executed out-of-order.
If the Pentium II really razzle-dazzled, it did it with RISC architecture at its core. The CISC instruction decoder added a bit of die size but that did not matter much and Intel had leading-edge manufacturing tech.
The internal parallelism was also put to good use by adding SIMD instructions (MMX). These first appeared in the Pentium MMX and Pentium II but the Pentium III did it much better and of course Intel has continued to add more powerful SIMD stuff over time.
RISC did not win only inside Intel chips of course. Every successful ISA since the 90's has been RISC including ARM and RISC-V. But even RISC chips feature some complex instructions these days.
The Workplace OS would also have been used on Apple hardware as part of the abortive Taligent project.
(It also would have been used on x86 and other platforms, but they started with PPC)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_OS
The 1990s were quite a time for personal and workstation computing.
I think the OS/2 subsystem was 16-bit OS/2 1.x so nobody cared and the POSIX subsystem was just compliant enough to win government contracts.
This design is why we have the "Windows Subsystem for Linux" (a name everybody hates) because "Windows Subsystems" were already a thing in Windows.
Docker, Distrobox, and even Flatpak are one kernel with multiple "personalities" but they are all still Linux I guess.
You can also argue have this on our desktops today with things like KVM in Linux and Hyper-V in Windows.
I also bet that many others would not have cared, and used UNIX/NT personality if that was the case.
But every subsystem other than Win32 was kneecapped mostly due to politics and market positioning.
In late 90s Microsoft bought a company which had developed a more enhanced Unix subsystem and rebranded it as Interix and marketed as Windows Subsytem for Unix (SFU).
I believe the original WSL was a resurrection of SFU before WSL2 pivoted to a VM-based approach.
IIRC, Interix still used same approach as original posix subsystem (and Windows and OS/2 subsystems) of providing the interface as DLL that ultimately your application would be linked against.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/drawbridge/
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/wsl/pico-pro...
Shredder https://files.catbox.moe/ciheyq.png
Undelete https://files.catbox.moe/ny7xbs.png
I recall trying OS/2 2.0 or 2.1 back in the day, coming from a DOS/Win3.11 setup. It seemed to have the same basic features as DOS/Windows but wasn't properly compatible with my existing software. Admittedly, this was before I knew anything about programming. I discovered Linux not much later. It wasn't compatible with anything either, but seemed like a totally different and much more compelling proposition.
I started out with OS/2 v1.1. It had threads, DLLs, multi-tasking, much larger memory space, and from v1.2 a somewhat decent filesystem. Coming from DOS 3.2/Win 2.0 this was an incredible leap, in particular the SDK was amazing compared to the ragtag assembly of info I was used to. The _delta_ between two systems haven't been this large ever since, and I think that is what contributes to the "magic" feeling.
However this also meant a more beefy hardware than the DOS/Windows 3.x combo.
It was also capable of sharing Mainframe printers using a real null-printer-driver, which was not possible on Windows NT3.51 or NT4.0. Windows always messed with the Mainframe codes that it could not understand.
It was also easy to set up OS/2 as a gateway between different network hardware and protocols (Token Ring to Ethernet, or NetBios to IPX/SPX, ...)
It had REXX!
Computers were far more crashy in those days, but OS/2 crashed far less often than Windows or even DOS did. And sometimes when a program crashed on OS/2, it only killed itself; it didn't take down the whole machine, so you had a chance to save your work in other programs before rebooting.
It also either was, or felt like it was, very very fast. Windows felt like a laggy VNC connection. GEM and the rest weren't much better speed-wise than GEOS on a Commodore 64.
The only stability gotcha was when some OS/2 PM application hung the input queue and then the whole of PM became unresponsive. The base OS continued running fine but PM was then unusable.
Back in that time period tech specs, and tech details really dominated a lot of "computers" discussion. I feel like that has kinda changed as far as the larger world goes (even if on HN tech specs are still relevant). Does an every day user want to use it? was less of a question for enthusiasts.
People today don't realize how much time was spent formatting floppy disks, and how slow the process could be. So slow that eventually companies started selling pre-formatted disks and charging extra for them.
OS/2 could give you back hours of productivity each month simply because you could do something else while formatting a disk.
Of course it had limitations of its own, I don't think you could any DOS/4GW games. Linux Installation seems simple compared to installing OS/2. I had to go through some sort of pre-installation guide which was printed on a separate paper and not part of the official manual. Also dual boot was meant literally: you booted into OS/2 and then you could "exit" into Windows. Back in DOS/Windows there was a command to do this the other way around. One time I didn't do this for half a year and was really anxious if my setup would make it...
I was mostly a kid with a huge stack of PC games I'd play, and OS/2 was a better launcher for many (but not all) of them than DOS/Windows. I was "dual booting" OS/2 WARP and DOS/Windows, but because of my gaming habits it was more like quintuple booting because I had a long boot menu with I want to say 4 to 7 different combinations of AUTOEXEC.BAT/CONFIG.SYS settings depending on type of game I intended to play or if I was going to use a Windows app or something else, then one OS/2 WARP boot option.
A bunch of Windows apps (many of which ran better, even) and even some games I recall I started launching from OS/2 WARP instead of DOS/Windows, making the first boot choice of the day a lot easier. (Though I don't remember being able to delete most of the other combinations, still had to reboot for certain games and Windows apps that needed more RAM than what OS/2 left for applications. OS/2's biggest problem at the time was a huge RAM footprint compared to Win3.11, much less DOS micro-tuned with AUTOEXEC.BAT/CONFIG.SYS low footprints for specific driver combos.)
Downloading a file via Zmodem was mostly a single task thing.
The Windows of the day could to the latter, but not the former.
OS/2 on my 8mb 386sx could do both AND have a clock up, and play solitaire, and have another terminal window open.
It took a bit to get there, and there was swapping while everything loaded, but it was true pre-emptive multitasking, while still maintaining the highly time critical I/O stuff that Windows couldn't touch.
The voicemail card was basically an 8088 and i think still used floppies IIRC. I didn't work with them directly but I used symposium heavily as an admin (symposium was the callcenter solution)
Though my time with them came only as non-IP phone systems started to be considered obsolete, I am still a huge fan of the rock-solid stability and realtime speed of those digital systems. Not to mention their lack of a need for subscription services to operate.
Sadly, by the time OS/2 was really competitive, MS had taken the market, and there was little reason for most users to go buy another operating system when Win3 or Win95 came on their machines, and NT was shipping on workstations.
I remember posting that article on a company intranet once and a bunch of former IBM sales folks (who now worked at the same company I did) chimed in to echo the idea that IBM had a neat product with OS/2 but as an organization had no idea what to do with it.
Not to say it would have overtaken Windows, but it also struggled because it was sold by a company who didn't know what to do with it.
Clearly, IBM was never that great at marketing much of anything IMO. However, many at the time also believed that in addition to not being that good at marketing, IBM (collectively) wasn't really overly interested in marketing OS/2.
All the things that made it better than Windows 3.0/3.1 also meant it was totally unsuited to fill the disruptive low-end of the PC market that ate Windows up.
The resulting Microsoft platform dominance led to ecosystem dominance led to software library dominance and that was the ballgame.
But Warp in particular was just sooooo heavy. I used it in the day, I even got a free cdrom somewhere. But it was just terribly sluggish. And I was a computer science student so I already had more resources than most. They really screwed that up so bad.
They should have called it OS/2 Wait
But OS/2 was always sensitive to available RAM, and IBM liked to understate its memory requirements. (They pretended that OS/2 2.0 could run on 4MB because they had promised it years earlier. But it was really unusable on only four megs.) Maybe that was the issue?
And yeah I'm sure I didn't have a ton of ram, I don't remember how much though. I was only a poor student (but as a computer science student I already had a lot more than most people I knew).
But if someone just went home with a CDROM and installed it, it usually would not end well, this was part of the problem. I knew some enthusiasts that loved it but they did invest specifically to run it. That's just not great for an OS that still has to prove itself.
At that time, there was a somewhat common saying "Annoy IBM, support OS/2!". This was essentially mocking the ineptness (disdain?) of IBM marketing for OS/2.
Over 40 years later, and I still remember mine, too. I have no idea why. Something about those octets that sticks in your brain like phone numbers used to.
tiahura•3mo ago
twoodfin•3mo ago
bombcar•3mo ago
Windows 95 ate the world because the world was mainly still DOS; look at the numbers. It wasn't people upgrading from Win 3.1.
esseph•3mo ago
BLKNSLVR•3mo ago
linguae•3mo ago
1313ed01•3mo ago
bombcar•3mo ago
Everyone I knew went from either no PC at all, or an older DOS 386-era machine to a Windows 95 computer.
rkomorn•3mo ago
I don't get what the numbers are supposed to imply.
imchillyb•3mo ago
Windows 95: ~1 million in first 4 days, ~7 million in first five weeks, ~40 million in first year.
These figures represent Microsoft’s own sales figures.
rkomorn•3mo ago
1313ed01•3mo ago
WorldMaker•3mo ago
twoodfin•3mo ago
I was paying very close attention to this world at the time, and I am confident that 90%+ of every PC that could run Win95 at the time of its release had been sold by an OEM as booting straight into the bundled copy of Win3.1.
Yes, lots of people had older PCs and got Win95 with their hardware upgrade cycle.
They were never in any danger of upgrading to OS/2 or anything else: Microsoft owned the OEM sales channel and the software ecosystem for the PC for a solid 5+ years before Windows 95.
Synaesthesia•3mo ago
hey squandered their early lead in the US among consumers and education and also ignored the international market.
Not gonna lie Wintel was a formidable force. Microsoft was ruthless in cornering the market.
But technically, OS/2 and MacOS gave Windows a run for it's money, arguably superior on some respects, and you could say the same for PowerPC and Intel.
Pocomon•3mo ago
‘The demos of OS/2 were excellent. Crashing the system had the intended effect – to FUD OS/2 2.0. People paid attention to this demo and were often surprised to our favor. Steve positioned it as -- OS/2 is not "bad" but that from a performance and "robustness" standpoint, it is NOT better than Windows’
"I have written a PM app that hangs the system (sometimes quite graphically)."
http://iowa.gotthefacts.org/011107/PX_0860.pdf http://iowa.gotthefacts.org/011107/PX_0797.pdf
tiahura•3mo ago
twoodfin•3mo ago
I don’t see how SteveB’s “bad app” was out of bounds. IBM was telling these analysts a bad app couldn’t bring down OS/2. As someone who used (and liked!) OS/2 at the time, this was indeed false: IIRC OS/2 in this era had a single-threaded UI loop, and a misbehaving app could (and occasionally did) block input for all apps and corrupt the UI.
You could argue about the difference between this and a Windows “UAE”, but to the user the experience was a broken, unusable OS/2.
thw_9a83c•3mo ago
There was never a chance at that time because x86 chips were produced in such volumes that PowerPC chips couldn't compete price-wise. Also, OS/2 became an instant outsider once Windows 95 was released. Two underdogs don't make a winner. The article says it all:
"The OS was clearly unfinished and not entirely stable. Worst of all, there were about zero applications. Because OS/2 PPC was never truly in use, PowerPC versions of OS/2 applications were never sold."
dan_linder•3mo ago
Man I was jealous!