[geeks] Microsoft Surface...

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Tue, 5 Jun 2007, Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:

> Sorry to break your bubble, but Microsoft has been, and still is the
> largest developer of Macintosh products. Without Microsoft, the Mac
> would never have taken off.

And, really, if they'd just develop Office and Visual Studio and maybe
SQL Server for everything, they'd be hated a lot less than they are for
forcing Windows on everyone, and possibly turn nearly as good a profit.
Most of their software is...well, I would've said "quite good", but
Office has been in decline since 97, and VS since 6.0...  Nevertheless,
the real stinker is Windows--ever since they concentrated more on games
than on business and engineering applications, the NT line become more
horrible with each revision.

> Windows/NT was first developed for a different platform than the PC, it's
> been discussed here before (was it MIPS?). There was also NT for MIPS,
> SPARC and Alpha, but no one bought it and it disappeared quickly.

Originally, it was to run on some nebulous platform based around the
i860.  Then it was retargeted for MIPS, which is where ARCS cames from.
SGI shifted towards ARCS, but didn't run NT on their MIPS hardware,
aside from a prototype Indigo2 that was wired and firmwared to be
little-endian.  DEC picked up ARCS (AlphaBIOS) for the Alpha/AXP
platform, and IBM had ARCS for a couple of PPC systems (42Ps and 43Ps
and the SCSI-less variants of them that sold under the IBM PC Company
banner).

Once upon a time, NT ran a -lot- better on RISC hardware than it did on
Intel hardware.  As of Beta 2 of Windows 2000, that's still largely the
case.  NT 4 on a 266MHz Alpha w/ 256MB memory just -flies-.  A PC of the
same vintage (and, really, anything up to a mid-range Pentium-II) feels
really sluggish by comparison.

What always confused me was that the Alpha, as far as I know, doesn't
-have- a 32-bit mode, yet Windows was a 32-bit OS.  The shift to Win64
was a monumental undertaking, just making the code 64-bit clean.  How
the hell did they get it to run on the Alpha, anyhow?  Did they just
have the compiler ensure that the upper half of each register was
all-zero (or all-one, depending on sign)?

-- 
Jonathan Patschke ) "If we keep our pride, though paradise is lost, we
Elgin, TX        (   will pay the price, but we cannot count the cost."
USA               )                             --Neil Peart, "Bravado"