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© 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.

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Last Update: 1/11/2001
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