Windows NT for Power Macintosh

Nostalgia reminds me of this: https://lowendmac.com/2014/next-openstep-and-the-triumphant-...

Amelio and the rest of his senior staff began searching for a way out. They needed a new operating system to buoy their attempts to compete with the Wintel juggernaut. The same search had taken place several times before, but now the company was desperate.

Limited Options Ultimately the list of possible targets was narrowed down to five options:

License Windows NT from Microsoft and bolt a Mac-like interface onto it. License Solaris from Sun and bolt a Mac-like interface onto it. Narrow the focus of the flagging Copland project and release it in a year and a half. Acquire Be and use BeOS. Acquire NeXT and use OpenStep.

The same developer ported PPC NT 4 to the Wii last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8BpUpr1h9U

Fascinating work. The ARC std https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARC_(specification) was used to boot the Dec Alpha Windows machines, along w/ MIPS, etc. Anyone know of other open source variants of that in the wild? At intel in 1998 the original efi spec was modeled on & inspired by Arc. The Intel boot initiative (IBI) in fact looked mostly like Arc. EFI (now UEFI) is sort of Arc + installable GUID-based interfaces (aka protocols) a la MS COM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_Object_Model. Page 8 of https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents... recounts some of those travails.

Windows NT was fascinating. If you want to read a great book about it, check out Showstopper.

Wow, just when I was looking for a reason to fire up my old 1998 bondi blue iMac G3, this pops up. What a weird, wild, and specific project!

Can someone explain the context here? Surely NT is closed source and was never developed for macs, what actually is this? And what are the chances you can get software for it? Presumably most NT software was compiled for Intel only and closed source.

Man, I loved Windows NT back in the day. It was light enough that I could run it on fairly low end late-90s hardware, and it was substantially more stable than Windows 95.

Very, very cool, and I can't wait to relive giving up all my DOS games!

I love the boot loader file https://github.com/Wack0/maciNTosh/blob/main/boot_files/Syst...

Sidenote: The Open Firmware syntax is so unreadable. No wonder it was scorned. A lost opportunity.

Writing a new NT HAL is a very impressive achievement. A tip of my hat to you, sir!

Docs are spotty at best, and I am sure many bugs aren’t known as existing HALs simply got lucky to not expose them.

Finally, I can run a domain controller off an old G3.

Microsoft killed the PowerPC 615 IBM engineer offers up 615 information https://www.theregister.com/1998/10/01/microsoft_killed_the_...

This is one of those things that I’d have nerdy arguments about with my nerdy friends in middle school.

Neat. I am totally going to try this on one of my spare Blue&White G3s.

Any screenshot?

THat's absurd. That's it, that's the comment. Hack of the Year award, stat!

If I had a dime for every person that's asked for this.

how far away is it from being a (even as a joke) daily driver?

It's been mentioned here before, but Dave Plummer's YouTube interview[1] with Dave Cutler[2] (NT lead architect) is a must-watch with never revealed before history about Windows NT.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxmZPMg7vIs&list=PLF2KJ6Gy3c...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Cutler