The PReP/CHRP was a venture by Apple, IBM, and Motorola (but primarily IBM) to allow companies to build OSes for a common platform. Apple didn't want to participate in the end. But like other ports of NT to MIPS and Alpha (Alpha enjoyed much more support until Compaq dropped support), the popularity was well beneath the dirt cheap in comparison x86 platform.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC_Reference_Platform
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Hardware_Reference_Plat...
This had nothing to do with Microsoft's monopoly. And nothing to do with exclusively 'desktop' PPC -- remember, NT4 Server also had PPC support through SP2. IBM's intention was for servers, not desktops (though they did produce compatible laptops/desktops), to support operating systems such as AIX and S[l]o[w|l]aris
AIX isn't exactly a desktop OS.
If so, only artificially; AIX was born on a workstation and seems to still support running a graphical desktop environment.
Intended use vs. potential use.
And yeah, NT4 Server was just NT4 Workstation with some registry fiddly bits flipped.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RT_PC
I wanted one on my desktop so bad. DOS/Win3.1 PCs were just so bad to me. Then I saw SunOS and really just wanted any Unix system on my desk. I bought a PC in 1994 just to install Linux.
Nice. Me too. But it was about 1989. The first machine I ever compiled a C program and it took me ages to find `a.out` and work out that that was my binary. I was more used to DOS compilers that turned $SOURCENAME.$ext into $sourcename.EXE.
From personal perception every time I read articles on Taligent, Copland, and Workplace OS (which did result in a demo PowerPC port of OS/2).
>This had nothing to do with Microsoft's monopoly.
Admittedly I had that comment in mind to pre-empt any potential narrativeposting.