© 1997-2006
Gareth Knight
All Rights reserved
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Amiga Windows NT
Developer: Commodore
Year of Announcement: 1991/2 |
According to Rudi Chiarito on the Team Amiga mailing list there
were plans to port Windows NT to the Amiga. I don't know anything
about this personally so I cannot check the validity of this.
I just recalled that some years ago a well-known
and respected Amiga
developer claimed that sometime before there was an Amiga port
of
Windows NT. This was something ultra-secret and, AFAIR, not one
of the
rumours that started spreading around the time of AAA and
Hombre (you
know, IIRC somebody at C= said that they wouldn't have minded
or
forbidden an NT port -- at that time it looked like it was
going to be
supported on most platforms -- and, voila', people were
reporting it as
if AmigaOS was going to be replaced by NT
altogether...).
The Windows NT suggestion was backed by Jim Noble who indicates
that Commodore had a different attitude to the Amiga.
'tis true. I was at the C= preview of the A4000
(IIRC it was in San Jose).
I had been talking with the "well-known and respected Amiga
developer" prior
to the event about his plans to port NT (he had already
obtained tentative
approval from M$), and he was rather upset to find out that C=
was not at all
supportive of the idea. So, at that event, I asked Lauren Brown
(official C=
"evangelist" at the time) what might be happening along those
lines. She stated
in no uncertain terms that C= had no interest whatsoever in the
project, and
would, in fact, probably actively discourage it. Go
figure.
encourage or support it.
Dr. Peter Kittel knew little about the project, if such a thing
existed. Fortunately, Dave Haynie remembered some details on plans
to port Windows NT but indicates development may not have even been
started at the time.
I vaguely recall some talk of this, nothing more
than perhaps a mention
or two. Do recall, at the time, that the 68K was a bit ahead of
the x86
in performance, the world wasn't quite as devoted to Windows as
they are
today, and Microsoft, in an effort to develop Windows NT, was
open to
practically any port, as long as someone else did the work (it
was only
later they charged a fortune for this). So it's at least
possible someone
was working on this, but I rather suspect "the was an Amiga
port of
Windows NT" is misleading -- it implies a finished port, with
I'm fairly
sure was not even close, and MS involvement, which was at the
time not
really an issue is any ports beyond their initial MIPS and x86
ports (eg,
Mot did all the work on the PPC version, DEC did all the work
on the
Alpha version).
It is doubtful even a line of code was ported to the Amiga. Even if
such a project was devised the actions of Commodore were as close
minded as ever. Fortunately the AmiWindows NT relationship may not
be over yet. The HP-RISC system jointly developed by Commodore
promised compatibility with the Microsoft OS and the AmigaNG system
is likely to include the ability to emulate an x86 processor and
provide the Amiga with 100% NT compatibility at last.
BACK
Last Update: 1/11/2001
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