I’m always curious how these projects come about and survive: why go to all of the effort to port for a dead-end product line? As technically sweet as it is? I imagine they would’ve found a decent market if they’d ported to Power Mac.
(Also, was the x86 emulation implemented in-house? I wouldn’t be surprised if some niche small company had a x86 emulator for PPC product that they could be paid to port.)
I'm not sure I agree with "dead end" outside of the benefit of hindsight, or maybe don't get the point you're making. Neither the PowerPC nor OS/2 were dead-end in 1995, and competition in the OS space was still happening. Why wouldn't IBM want to have PowerPC survive, let alone thrive, with OS options? And surely they'd have loved something to take on Microsoft at this point in history.
I think oddities like this were a consequence of a hardware world that was rocketing along the heart of Moore’s Law, alongside a software world that hadn’t matured past multi-year product cycles.
When OS/2 for PowerPC was set in motion, that Intel would “Make CISC
Great Again” with the Pentium was far from clear.
I remember that the "general consensus" was that RISC was gonna win, it was just a matter of when (and when it could be affordable). What was NOT certain was which RISC architecture would come out ahead, so there was a bunch of porting to "remove the risk" - later they would unport most everything and "remove the RISC".
Pentium shook that tree a bit, and Pentium II really razzle-dazzled it.
One of the original design requirements for NT was that it be portable between different CPU architectures, it was one of the driving forces behind its creation.
So much so in fact, Microsoft developed NT 3.1 first on non-x86 architectures (i860 and MIPS), then later ported to x86, to ensure no x86 specific code made it in.
"Windows NT 3.1 was released for Intel x86 PC compatible and PC-98 platforms, and for DEC Alpha and ARC-compliant MIPS platforms. Windows NT 3.51 added support for the PowerPC processor in 1995"...
NT is a pretty interesting bit of PC history, I can highly recommend the book "Show Stopper!" by G. Pascal Zachary that recounts its development, and also dives a bit into why making the OS portable across CPU architectures was so important to the team at the time.
I’m always curious how these projects come about and survive: why go to all of the effort to port for a dead-end product line? As technically sweet as it is? I imagine they would’ve found a decent market if they’d ported to Power Mac.
(Also, was the x86 emulation implemented in-house? I wouldn’t be surprised if some niche small company had a x86 emulator for PPC product that they could be paid to port.)
I'm not sure I agree with "dead end" outside of the benefit of hindsight, or maybe don't get the point you're making. Neither the PowerPC nor OS/2 were dead-end in 1995, and competition in the OS space was still happening. Why wouldn't IBM want to have PowerPC survive, let alone thrive, with OS options? And surely they'd have loved something to take on Microsoft at this point in history.
I think oddities like this were a consequence of a hardware world that was rocketing along the heart of Moore’s Law, alongside a software world that hadn’t matured past multi-year product cycles.
When OS/2 for PowerPC was set in motion, that Intel would “Make CISC Great Again” with the Pentium was far from clear.
I remember that the "general consensus" was that RISC was gonna win, it was just a matter of when (and when it could be affordable). What was NOT certain was which RISC architecture would come out ahead, so there was a bunch of porting to "remove the risk" - later they would unport most everything and "remove the RISC".
Pentium shook that tree a bit, and Pentium II really razzle-dazzled it.
There was definitely VirtualPC for PowerPC Macs, I used it to run TurboTax way back in the day.
Didn’t know that OS/2 had a PowerPC port, but more surprisingly, Windows NT also had a PowerPC port. Never heard of those.
One of the original design requirements for NT was that it be portable between different CPU architectures, it was one of the driving forces behind its creation.
So much so in fact, Microsoft developed NT 3.1 first on non-x86 architectures (i860 and MIPS), then later ported to x86, to ensure no x86 specific code made it in.
NT supported quite a few architectures:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Supported_platforms
"Windows NT 3.1 was released for Intel x86 PC compatible and PC-98 platforms, and for DEC Alpha and ARC-compliant MIPS platforms. Windows NT 3.51 added support for the PowerPC processor in 1995"...
NT is a pretty interesting bit of PC history, I can highly recommend the book "Show Stopper!" by G. Pascal Zachary that recounts its development, and also dives a bit into why making the OS portable across CPU architectures was so important to the team at the time.
It was also on mips and alpha. There was an intergraph port as well that never went out
What could have been. If the respective parties had just gotten their acts together on the PPC 615, OS/2, WordPerfect, and Lotus.
Was there any act that would have overcome the synergy of Intel’s commodity hardware economics and Microsoft’s ecosystem dominance?
Yes, getting stuff together and getting it out there.
Windows 95 ate the world because the world was mainly still DOS; look at the numbers. It wasn't people upgrading from Win 3.1.