On Fri, Nov 18, 2005 at 05:01:39PM -0500, John Macdonald wrote: > However, as I recall, NT was being developed for the Alpha at > one point - I think it was available commercially for a while > and not just internal to MS. Not to surprising, actually, > since a large chunk of the original NT design team was hired > away from DEC (Dave Cutler et al).
If you're interested in this kind of history, go hunt up a copy of _Showstopper_ by G. Pascal Zachary. It's a chronicle of Dave Cutler and the effort to build the first version of WinNT. It's a great read. When Cutler's team jumped ship from DEC to MSFT, they wanted to build a bolder, better version of VMS. Initially, the GUI was not a core feature, but that changed somewhat quickly. Their original spec was to target the i860, a RISC chip from Intel, and explictly avoid the i386 because it was a dain-bread CPU. Some time early in the project, the concept of HAL (the hardware abstraction layer that's still in NT and its spawn) entered into the mix, as they thought about switching RISC chips since the i860 wasn't setting any speed records, meeting any price targets or volume production projections. As the deadline got closer, the pressure to deliver on 386 grew, to the point where the 386 was the preferred platform. The original releases supported i386(+), Alpha, MIPS, and PowerPC. After a release or two, it was a foregone conclusion that NT was an x86 operating system. The exception was DEC, who sold NT on Alpha *and* x86, and was the only game in town for the three customers who wanted 64-bit NT apps, or lots of memory/disk on their NT apps. NT/Alpha slowly fell through the cracks as DEC got bought and re-bought over the years. The only Alpha customers that mattered were those running OpenVMS... <i-remember-when> At one point in 1994/1995, I investigated alternative hardware for NT at the time, and it was impossible to find a PowerPC box for sale that was capable of running NT. (This was the time of the Mac's grand switch from the 68040 to the PPC 601/603/620.) NEC was selling MIPS/NT boxes, while DEC was selling Alpha/NT boxes (possibly the only vendors for each architecutre, FWIR). But all of these boxes tended to be around $5K or above, right about the time when Pentium desktops were starting to sink below the $1K mark, and "server" x86 boxes were reasonably priced at ~$3K. Of course, it was absolutely impossible to get any comparable performance data across architectures. The MIPS boxes were expensive, and presumably nothing faster than the Pentiums of the day (probably much slower). The only reason to use Alpha was to get the 64-bit addressing. There were some demos using 64-bit NT with 64-bit databases (and a king's ransom in memory) massively outperforming pick-your-platform with 32-bit architectures. </i-remember-when> Z. _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
