2 ms·

That's not true: > The widely popular Windows NT 4.0 release carried initial support for Alpha, MIPS and PowerPC in addition to the Intel x86 platform

• hulitu 5y ago
  Nt 4.0 was not "widely popular". And people heard about MIPS, Alpha and PowerPC ports from newspapers. As far as a i heard almost nobody ran those ports.
  • phendrenad2 5y ago
    NT 4.0 was "widely popular" when it came out. Consumer PCs didn't run it, so it's forgotten history. Anyway the question was whether NT ran on big-endian architectures, which I answered. I have nothing to say about how popular those ports were, only that they were easily technically achievable for the NT OS.
    • kazinator 5y ago
      You have no answered it at all. Dec Alpha is little-endian (little-endian only, I believe). MIPS and PowerPC are bi-endian (possibly depending on exact model? Maybe some can be switched, whereas some are fixed?) Windows NT ran on PowerPC in little endian mode. Hey look, A Reymond Chen article from 2018 mentions this: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180806-00/?p=99425 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180806-00/?p=99... The Pocket PC (later Windows CE, later Windows Mobile) were used on MIPS quite a bit. I did some Windows CE work on MIPS units. It was all little endian. I don't think NT on MIPS was any different.
  • kazinator 5y ago
    I think there was a fair bit of DEC Alpha action in the Windows server scene for a couple of years. By the way, I visited the Microsoft Exchange building in Redmond some time in 1999 or 2000. I was shown a room full of Alpha servers. :)