[rescue] NeXTSTEP or OPENSTEP?

Carl R. Friend crfriend at rcn.com
Sat Aug 9 16:21:10 CDT 2014


    On Sat, 9 Aug 2014, Lionel Peterson wrote:

> WinNT *was* released on Alpha, it was supported on Multias and other Alpha
> machines of that period.
>
> It didn't go anywhere AFAIK.

    It went all the way up until NT 4 and then died a speedy death.  I
have an Alpha system that originally ran NT4 until the disk died in
it and I opted to load VMS.  Unfortunately the 1-year license for that
has expired and I cannot renew it thanks to HP taking the hobbyist
program internal.  Recycle time.

> Originally, NT supported four CPU types: MIPS, Alpha, PowerPC, and
> Intel:
>
> http://m.windowsitpro.com/windows-client/death-alpha-nt

    Having been closely linked to Intergraph during the early 1990s
I can state for a fact that support was originally pledged for the
CLIPPER chip-set.  However, "he who sups with the devil needs to
use a very long spoon" came to pass and M$ cut INGR off at the knees
regarding the project.

    I was unaware that MIPS was an original target.  Interesting.

    The above having been said, I suspected that NT was a VMS ripoff
since I first got exposed to NT 3.5.  I'll not go so far as to say
it was bug-for-bug "compatible" with early VMS but there was one
heck of a lot of resonance there; it was eerily similar in feel to
VMS 3 even with its GUI interface.  (This is a familiar progression
in Cutler-designed OSes.)

    Cheers!

+------------------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Carl Richard Friend (UNIX Sysadmin)            | West Boylston       |
| Minicomputer Collector / Enthusiast            | Massachusetts, USA  |
| mailto:crfriend at rcn.com                        +---------------------+
| http://users.rcn.com/crfriend/museum           | ICBM: 42:22N 71:47W |
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