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TIL: There used to be an Internet Explorer for Unix
- tibbon 14y agoAnd there used to be Microsoft Unix distribution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix).
- jgw 14y agoThere was also an early version of Windows Media Player for Linux - complete with a spiffy Motif interface! And there was a DEC Alpha port of Windows NT. [EDIT: I don't believe it was called "Windows Media Player" exactly, but it was a media player for x86 Linux from Microsoft. Can't find a link to it after a cursory search, but it did exist - I used it]
- yangyang 14y agoThere were NT ports to MIPS and PowerPC too.
- cmbaus 14y agoI think NT was originally developed on MIPS and ported to x86.
- yangyang 14y agoDave Cutler was very fond of MIPS and worked on that port, but I think it was done concurrently with the x86 version.
- wglb 14y agoI don't think this is true. From what I can figure out, Windows was ported to MIPS, but had always been first done on intel hardware. Do you have a link or reference for this? Curious.
- jensnockert 14y agoIt was originally developed for a Microsoft internal Intel i860 workstation, that's also from where the name NT comes from.
- hapless 14y agoI've actually used this, and IE5 was by far the best/fastest browser on Solaris at the time. Seriously an order of magnitude faster than Netscape 4.x. With IE, browsing the web was practical on a 100 MHz SPARC. IE for UNIX was ported by Mainsoft, now more famous for leaking the Windows NT source code. It also came bundled with an Outlook Express-like mail client, but I never tried it.
- vonmoltke 14y agoIndeed. This was my go-to browser on the SPARC pizza boxes in my university's engineering labs
- xSwag 14y agoPlease keep stuff like this limited to Reddit. If I wanted to see "TIL" I would browse /r/todayilearned not Hacker News.
- fredley 14y agoWhy? It's a relevant article. If the 'TIL' itself annoys you then that's your problem. There is no correct way to do language, especially on the internet.
- pyre 14y ago- Meta comments like this aren't always useful discussion. - There is a flag option on a story. If enough people agree with you, then it will affect change. - It doesn't make the front page of HN unless it gets upvoted, so obviously there are HN users that disagree with you.
- derpenxyne 14y agoApologies if that offends you, if I could still edit the title to appease you, I would.
- ben1040 14y agoLooking at the version history, I totally forgot about the early days of the web when browsers by default only came with 40-bit encryption because of US export regulations.
- mathnode 14y agoAdobe Photoshop 3 was released for Solaris Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere all were released for IRIX. It's almost as if IRIX and Solaris used to have a very large workstation customer base then everything was migrated to NT, Mac, and Linux, how spooky those crazy expensive workstations didn't stay viable for long. O-M-G girlfriend, history is like totally repeating itself!
- hapless 14y agoThe Adobe suite on IRIX/Solaris used a really clumsy macintosh-to-motif auto-port system. The resulting ports were really bad. Before Photoshop on Macintosh, the normal way to do that type of work on a computer was to buy a turnkey system from BarcoColor or similar. Yes, the bundled UNIX workstation might run IRIX, but it was turnkey -- the end user just wanted to run Barco. Photoshop on a Mac IIfx cost about 1/10th as much and was at least half as good. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the bottom dropped out of the turnkey market for photoshop-type tasks. (For video, it stayed alive and well for many more years: discreet was selling IRIX turnkey up until 2004 or so)
- DanBC 14y agoIt's been mentioned on HN a few times too: (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1739296 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1739296) (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3334210 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3334210) I posted that link too! (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4562692 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4562692)