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And then there's this bit: >History matters; the Android codebase is designed to be ported in ways Microsoft is probably culturally incapable of even imagining

And then there's this bit: >History matters; the Android codebase is designed to be ported in ways Microsoft is probably culturally incapable of even imagining. NT is portable. It's been ported to at least four CPUs that I know of (x86, Alpha, MIPS, and PowerPC), and MS has announced that they will deliver it on ARM. I don't much care for MS, but pretending that they're incapable of writing a portable OS is nonsense.

redrobot5050 16y ago
Um...you do know that all the non-Alpha/x86 ports were considered failures in-house and dropped, right? Portability was one of the first things Microsoft sacrificed to get things "working right". And the OS engineers who wrote the "portable" NT code have long since vested and moved on. The new kids on the block have probably never seen their code.
- zohebv 16y ago
  > Um...you do know that all the non-Alpha/x86 ports were considered failures in-house and dropped, right? This is patently false. > And the OS engineers who wrote the "portable" NT code have long since vested and moved on. The new kids on the block have probably never seen their code. As an ex-Microsoftie I can tell you that you are wrong. Check Dave Cutler, Larry Wang and several other engineers (even from the original VMS team) still at Microsoft. NT has been ported to several different architectures internally many times over, though commercially only the x86 and PowerPC (XBox 360) variants have been widely released. Itanium ports worked perfectly well, but there was never any significant market for it.
- danieldk 16y ago
  Right, and this is why my Windows NT 4.0 CD contained x86, Alpha, MIPS and PPC versions. I had never tried anything but Intel, but it was certainly not just in-house.
  - redrobot5050 16y ago
    Right, and how many Windows NT apps were there for MIPS and PPC? If Developers still have too much trouble creating "universal" apps, your port is effectively dead. Outside of x86 and Alpha, NT was never used.
- deleted 16y ago
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zohebv 16y ago
They have it working on ARM internally already. And the current WP7 OS kernel is Windows CE, one of the most widely ported OS of all time, running on SH4, MIPS, x86, ARM i.e. almost any little-endian architecture.

redrobot5050 16y ago

Um...you do know that all the non-Alpha/x86 ports were considered failures in-house and dropped, right? Portability was one of the first things Microsoft sacrificed to get things "working right". And the OS engineers who wrote the "portable" NT code have long since vested and moved on. The new kids on the block have probably never seen their code.

zohebv 16y ago
> Um...you do know that all the non-Alpha/x86 ports were considered failures in-house and dropped, right? This is patently false. > And the OS engineers who wrote the "portable" NT code have long since vested and moved on. The new kids on the block have probably never seen their code. As an ex-Microsoftie I can tell you that you are wrong. Check Dave Cutler, Larry Wang and several other engineers (even from the original VMS team) still at Microsoft. NT has been ported to several different architectures internally many times over, though commercially only the x86 and PowerPC (XBox 360) variants have been widely released. Itanium ports worked perfectly well, but there was never any significant market for it.
danieldk 16y ago
Right, and this is why my Windows NT 4.0 CD contained x86, Alpha, MIPS and PPC versions. I had never tried anything but Intel, but it was certainly not just in-house.
- redrobot5050 16y ago
  Right, and how many Windows NT apps were there for MIPS and PPC? If Developers still have too much trouble creating "universal" apps, your port is effectively dead. Outside of x86 and Alpha, NT was never used.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

zohebv 16y ago

They have it working on ARM internally already. And the current WP7 OS kernel is Windows CE, one of the most widely ported OS of all time, running on SH4, MIPS, x86, ARM i.e. almost any little-endian architecture.