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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

Lots of excellent answers but this is the best response that gets to the core of the question (don’t know how to make a link to an answer, so pasting it here):

> Processor architectures come and go. The history of the 68k architecture is perfectly normal. It's the x86 that's anomalous. I believe that is the result of Microsoft's peculiar inability to switch architectures. No other software company seems so stuck: they move opportunistically to whatever architecture suits their immediate needs. Apple has evolved 6502->68k->PPC->x86->ARM. – John Doty Sep 25 at 12:14

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> Microsoft's peculiar inability to switch architectures.

More like third party publishers? Windows has been released for many architectures in the past but without bringing the software ecosystem along it never worked out. They presently seem to be trying to correct that, with an x86 emulator included in their ARM version of Windows 11, but don't have the hardware offerings to create demand.

Right, Windows NT was shipped on PowerPC, MIPS and Alpha up until 1999; Then MS shipped Windows Server on IA64 Itanium from around that time right up to 2010, alongside the x64 version - including shipping IA64 versions of .NET, SQL Server, etc. And they began shipping Windows on ARM with WindowsRT in 2011.

I actually don't think there has been any significant period where Microsoft was only shipping core Windows operating systems on only x86. It's possible that's actually a deliberate strategy.

But to your point, what they have never been able to do was persuade any significant part of the ecosystem to notice.

There was also a PowerPC build of Windows XP, which was preloaded on Xbox 360 dev kits (which were ironically PowerMac G5 towers configured to roughly match 360 hardware).

It’s a lot easier to make the devs move when you control the hardware too.

> Right, Windows NT was shipped on PowerPC, MIPS and Alpha up until 1999

Were there any compilers for those architectures from Microsoft ?

Yep, you could get visual studio processor packs in the mail. At least for ppc and mips.

Yes. How else would they build their OS and applications?

> They presently seem to be trying to correct that, with an x86 emulator

DEC created an x86 emulator for the DEC Alpha version of Windows NT, but it still didn't get any traction, despite the Alpha being the performance king back in the day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FX!32

I feel like this comment needs some extra emphasis, especially when it comes to third-party drivers, perhaps even more than application software.

Very wrong aswer though. Microsoft's NT OS line runs on multiple architectures. Apple's 68k to PPC transition was a disaster. They fixed it later, but the first gen PPC was near unworkable. I loved Apple's Mac line before that, but this made me switch.

68k to PPC transition really wasn’t a disaster. Was these a year or two when certain apps (Photoshop was a big one) we’re not updated for PPC, and this ran about the same or slightly slower on a PPC Mac as compared to a 2 year old Quadra? Sure. But clock speeds advanced quick enough and Adobe finally got their native apps working and things were pretty good by year 2 of the transition.

I had one of those first gen PPC Macs, Having spend big on a new machine and have everything run much slower than on your old machine, and that in a time where unlike today we did not have performance to spare, was a real turnoff.

It got abetter eventually, but by then 1st gen was already replaced, and you had to buy the next version of the software as well if eventually a PPC native version came available. Office software in those days was also much more expensive than today.

At the same time Microsoft released Windows 95, arguably the first Windows with a usable GUI. The PPC switch was a disaster for Apple, no doubt about it.

As I have pointed out elsewhere, that's a question comment, not an answer. And this very discussion here exemplifies the problem with people wrongly using comments for answers. Most of the objections raised here to that question comment were in fact already raised on StackExchange. Several are hidden because of the way that StackExchange decides what comments to show.

If it had been an actual answer, in contrast, you would have had a "Share" hyperlink to click on, bringing up a pop-up that allows you to copy a hyperlink for the answer, even on your device. The person mis-placing an answer in a question comment hasn't helped you, either.

Microsoft can switch architectures though. I have an ARM64 Windows VM on my M1 mac. It runs x86 executables seamlessly and fast enough that you don't even notice that there's an emulation/translation layer underneath.

Is this emulation layer inside of Windows or are you talking about Rosetta 2?

The Windows 9x series (and earlier) were tightly coupled with x86 (and DOS).

The Windows NT family of operating systems has always had the "Hardware Abstraction Layer" (aka HAL) which helped with porting the operating system to other architectures.

Inside of Windows. Rosetta can only do x86_64, this can run 32-bit x86 code as well.

Check the root folder it an NT 4.0 install and you’ll see about 5 different architecture flavours in there.

Xbox also showed that MS is capable of the seemingly impossible if they see the cash is there.

I think that may just show that Dave Cutler is capable of the seemingly impossible.

It's only anomalous in that it's the one that happened to survive. As the industry matured, players consolidated, and there were more benefits to one dominant architecture with a few implementations than multiple architectures. At some point, CPUs got so complex the instruction set became more of an API than anything actually rooted in hardware, extending the lifespan of the instruction set even longer.

> "It's the x86 that's anomalous. I believe that is the result of Microsoft's peculiar inability to switch architectures."

Why do people keep forgetting that Intel was at the forefront of fab process improvements for 2-3 decades, thanks to the enormous revenue and economy of scale of manufacturing coming from the computerization of society from the '90s onward? None of the UNIX server / workstation OEMs with their own CPU architectures could keep up, not even the well heeled Sun Microsystems. AMD couldn't keep up and had to spin off GlobalFoundries. ARM / MIPS and other minor architectures eked out meager existences as embedded processors only because Intel didn't deign to pursue a low margin market. It was a combination of Intel's fab prowess and the lack of motivation from software developers to build Windows software for non-x86 platforms that kept x86 chugging along.

It's not intuitive at all, you click the timestamp and the URL changes to the anchor for that comment. Here's the one you copy/pasted: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/27722/why...

In part that's because it's not an answer. Answers have an obvious "Share" hyperlink below them. That, there, in contrast is a question comment.

Thanks! I guessed that based on HN but for some reason I couldn’t get it to work on my device.

Not intuitive but it's the same on HN :)

And Facebook and Twitter and at some point Reddit...

> I believe that is the result of Microsoft's peculiar inability to switch architectures.

This is simply not true.

I'm running Windows right now--to post this response--on an ARM Windows laptop. Microsoft has had Windows on RISC machines. Alpha, MIPS, PowerP and Itanium. They were all reado, should any of these architecturs take off. (See: https://virtuallyfun.com/2023/08/05/come-meet-tenox-check-ou...)

Stop spreading misinformation.

6502 was Apple II, the IIGS used a 16 bit 65C816, both of those are seperate from the Macintosh going through 68k->PPC->x86->ARM, and to be even more pedantic 68K -> PPC was the old mac system, then PPC ->x86 was OSX, and the current x86 ->ARM has been MacOS,

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