3 ms·

TIL Windows 3.1 was running on MIPS

p_l 2y ago
Windows NT 3.x and 4.x ran pretty much on whatever had at least 32bits and little endian byte order, and vendor willing to support the porting effort. Though it's especially hilarious that MIPS ARC died pretty fast (outside of SGI ARC variant which was big-endian) so on most other platforms Windows was dragging around a wrapper around platform firmware that provided enough ARC interfaces for ntoskrnl.exe to boot.
- rzzzt 2y ago
  In the article the author is running Windows 3.1's installer in a SoftWindows emulator: https://winworldpc.com/product/softwindows/20 https://winworldpc.com/product/softwindows/20
  - p_l 2y ago
    Ah, somehow I hilariously skipped over the sentence that would make it all work out, thanks
lproven 2y ago
> TIL Windows 3.1 was running on MIPS It wasn't and didn't. Note the article mentions a bundled copy of SoftWindows. This was a full-system x86-32 PC emulator in software. https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Insignia_SoftWindows https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Insignia_SoftWindows It ran on lots of OSes as well as classic MacOS. It was the successor of an earlier product called SoftPC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftPC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftPC The later version was slightly revamped to run Windows better, for instance by having some kind of native-code-accelerated GPU emulation. It was in turn replaced by SoftWindows95 which could run 32-bit Windows 9x, although by then, PC performance was starting to catch up with workstation performance. A fast 80486 with local-bus graphics and disk controllers was quite responsive and a Pentium even more so and by the 2nd-generation 3.3V Pentium chips (75/90/100, and for the richer, 120/133MHz) with PCI graphics and disk were getting up to near low-end Unix workstation performance. A software-emulated version of Windows wasn't so desirable any more: you had to buy most of the apps to run on it, and while it was OK for simple productivity stuff, around that time Windows NT 4 came out and now a high-end PC with SCSI disks had a pretty good GUI on a stable OS. Some of those workstation apps started to get ported to x86 NT and you could buy a fast x86 box for a lot less than a UNIX workstation.

p_l 2y ago

Windows NT 3.x and 4.x ran pretty much on whatever had at least 32bits and little endian byte order, and vendor willing to support the porting effort. Though it's especially hilarious that MIPS ARC died pretty fast (outside of SGI ARC variant which was big-endian) so on most other platforms Windows was dragging around a wrapper around platform firmware that provided enough ARC interfaces for ntoskrnl.exe to boot.

rzzzt 2y ago
In the article the author is running Windows 3.1's installer in a SoftWindows emulator: https://winworldpc.com/product/softwindows/20 https://winworldpc.com/product/softwindows/20
- p_l 2y ago
  Ah, somehow I hilariously skipped over the sentence that would make it all work out, thanks

lproven 2y ago

> TIL Windows 3.1 was running on MIPS It wasn't and didn't. Note the article mentions a bundled copy of SoftWindows. This was a full-system x86-32 PC emulator in software. https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Insignia_SoftWindows https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Insignia_SoftWindows It ran on lots of OSes as well as classic MacOS. It was the successor of an earlier product called SoftPC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftPC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftPC The later version was slightly revamped to run Windows better, for instance by having some kind of native-code-accelerated GPU emulation. It was in turn replaced by SoftWindows95 which could run 32-bit Windows 9x, although by then, PC performance was starting to catch up with workstation performance. A fast 80486 with local-bus graphics and disk controllers was quite responsive and a Pentium even more so and by the 2nd-generation 3.3V Pentium chips (75/90/100, and for the richer, 120/133MHz) with PCI graphics and disk were getting up to near low-end Unix workstation performance. A software-emulated version of Windows wasn't so desirable any more: you had to buy most of the apps to run on it, and while it was OK for simple productivity stuff, around that time Windows NT 4 came out and now a high-end PC with SCSI disks had a pretty good GUI on a stable OS. Some of those workstation apps started to get ported to x86 NT and you could buy a fast x86 box for a lot less than a UNIX workstation.