Not that odd. The NT group specifically wanted a portable design, and they made the right call to initially target i860, MIPS and only then i386 machines. Contr

Not that odd. The NT group specifically wanted a portable design, and they made the right call to initially target i860, MIPS and only then i386 machines. Contrast that to OS/2 development - the (never shipped) PowerPC OS/2 port was based on top of of an IBM fork of Mach, because the kernel was too x86 specific (derived from the pre-virtual memory 16-bit protected mode code).