Linux at 17 – What Windows promised to be
(…) Linux is what Windows had once promised to be – at least in terms of cross-platform support. In the wake of the PowerPC alliance from IBM, Apple, and Motorola in 1991, Microsoft made a commitment to support Windows NT 3.51 on PowerPC chips. Windows eventually added support for Digital’s Alpha NEC’s and SGI’s MIPS chips. Workstation maker Intergraph ported Windows NT 3.51 to its Clipper chips and said it was creating a port to Sparc chips from Sun. Neither ports saw the light of day.
Windows NT 4.0, which came out in 1996, only supported nothing more than f32-bit x86, Alpha, and MIPS chips, and by the turn of the millennium, only x86 chips were supported. (Interestingly, the PowerPC alliance also lined up IBM’s OS/2 and AIX Unixes – the OS/2 was never delivered – and even Sun Microsystems’ SunOS Unix was slated for the PowerPC chips. IBM also ported its OS/400 minicomputer operating system to the 64-bit variants of PowerPC).
While Microsoft has expanded support to cover Itanium processors – mostly at the urging of Hewlett-Packard, Intel’s Itanium development partner and the one with the most to gain from Windows-on-Itanium for its high-end Integrity servers – Microsoft has not made good on the initial cross-platform promises for Windows server. Microsoft has suffered from this, but not as much as Intel has been helped.