[rescue] NeXTSTEP or OPENSTEP?

[Carl R. Friend]

   On Sat, 9 Aug 2014, Lionel Peterson wrote:

> Releasing NT in SPARC would not have been a very good idea, it's success would
> have relied on third-parties to cross-compile their applications to a new CPU
> architecture for any real success, IMHO. Did Win NT on Alpha really amount to
> much? Win NT/SPARC would have been a third platform for vendors to support...

    "Releasing" NT (Mica) on anything but x86 would have been frought
with difficulty as the hardware manufacturer would have been beholden
to Microsoft for continued ports.  Alpha and SPARC were but two possible
platforms for NT -- CLIPPER was also considered, and it was rumoured
that a version was actually coaxed into operation at Intergraph in the
early '90s.  But it was a bad idea from the get-go and died a fairly
quick death, taking the CLIPPER chip-set with it.  Alpha followed soon
thereafter.  SPARC soldiered on for a while longer as Sun tried to make
a go of things, but that's likely going to go the way of the dinosaur
now that Oracle owns things.

    So we're left with Intel.  See my earlier commentary about
monocultures.

    Cheers.

+------------------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Carl Richard Friend (UNIX Sysadmin)            | West Boylston       |
| Minicomputer Collector / Enthusiast            | Massachusetts, USA  |
| mailto:crfriend at rcn.com                        +---------------------+
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