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That was after the Pentium Pro appeared. Before the Pentium Pro, MS wanted NT to be cross-platform just in case 'RISC' processors became big.
by Paianni 7y ago
That was after the Pentium Pro appeared. Before the Pentium Pro, MS wanted NT to be cross-platform just in case 'RISC' processors became big.
- p_l 7y agoThe model of "contact us and we will arrange the partnership" was, IMO, very wise method of getting the ports everywhere. At one point this sparked rumours of NT/amiga due to some informal talks that never progressed anywhere, but with MS already having established a reputation of "you get an NT port, and you, and you!" And MS actually went a bit further and enforced portability by developing NT on a non-x86 platform that nobody else had (IIRC using i860) and then porting it to target platforms - of which x86 was considered a bit of a toy. This is heavily visible with how NT had to carry around a significant portion of ARC runtime so that its boot process could work on non-ARC x86. Unfortunately, they didn't prepare well enough for 64bits, and we had to wait till Windows 2000 and Itanium port to get Win64.