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That’s great! I’ve got an old copy of visual studio and windows nt 3.1 in the closet, ran on mips, alpha, sparc and intel. Back when Microsoft was cross platfor
by spandextwins 3y ago
That’s great! I’ve got an old copy of visual studio and windows nt 3.1 in the closet, ran on mips, alpha, sparc and intel. Back when Microsoft was cross platform.
- luma 3y agoThey still are, ARM is widely supported. There just aren’t many other platforms in wide use today to target.
- Furball37 3y agoI'm 100% sure you're misremembering it running on SPARC, NT never ran on SPARC.
- dagw 3y agoCorrect. NT 3.1 ran on x86, Alpha and MIPS. NT 3.5 added PowerPC support. As you say, SPARC was never supported. Windows 2000 had both x86 and Alpha support up through the release candidate, but Alpha was dropped before final release. I actually had an Alpha workstation running Windows 2000 (for fun) back in the mists of time.
- Furball37 3y agoThere's also the Beta Whistler AXP64 Build which was used to port Windows over to 64-bit before there was any 64-bit hardware available that could run NT. The people in the virtuallyfun discord got that running (I am part of that! I have an AlphaServer 800 5/500 next to me, with some hacks to the setup and telling it what HAL DLL to load it installed perfectly!)
- omnibrain 3y agoLater there was Windows XP 64-Bit Edition for Itanic Workstations and there was Windows Server up to 2008 R2 for Itanic Servers.
- scruffyherder 3y agoItanium XP was weird, it's like that super early AMD64 version where more of the OS is 32bit than 64bit, with no high theming. It was still exciting at the time.
- omnibrain 3y agoIIRC it was even weirder, because it was a XP branded Server 2003 under the hood.
- dagw 3y agoIt's even weirder than that :) The initial release of XP for Itanium was more or less a stripped down XP build with limited 64 bit support. They then quickly gave up on that approach and released a second version of Windows XP for Itanium, together with the launch of Itanium 2 support, which was, as you said, a rebranded Server 2003.
- omnibrain 3y agoOne could say, that they tried really hard. ;)
- slamonjam 3y agoThere was an announcement that Intergraph would port Windows NT to SPARC: http://ftp.lanet.lv/ftp/sun-info/sunflash/1993/Jul/55.11-Sun-Intergraph:-SPARC-and-Windows-NT http://ftp.lanet.lv/ftp/sun-info/sunflash/1993/Jul/55.11-Sun... Guess it never went anywhere.
- kjs3 3y agoIt didn't. There are rumors it got out to a handful of alpha/beta sites, but it was never a supported product.
- markhahn 3y agoinstead of sparc, I wonder if you were remembering the i860, which certainly ran NT/OS2.
- dboreham 3y agoThere was a sparc port. I don't think it was ever public though.
- spandextwins 3y agoWhoops, it wasn’t sparc but PowerPC. I’ve also got a copy of CodeWarrior for sparc. Lots of oldies but goodies. A few big boxes of them. Someday I’ll have to do something with them. Not sure if I’d get sued if I rip them and post them someplace.
- nullindividual 3y agoAfter NT 3.1, I don’t think Microsoft was ever a single processor architecture company. Beyond what NT supported, WinCE entered the picture in the very late 90s with ARM support among other architectures.
- monocasa 3y agoEven before then, their cash cow was first BASIC implementations, on at least 6502 and 8080 relatively initially. Then Multiplan ran on most of the major microcomputers of the time. It's interesting that in their history, strict Wintel is more the anomaly in their history.