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Comment by nullindividual | Hacker News Reader

Where are you getting this information?

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.

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> 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.

AIX was the first Unix I ever used in 1991 on an IBM RT with the ROMP CPU

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.

> AIX was the first Unix I ever used in 1991 on an IBM RT with the ROMP CPU

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.

I had one of these back in the early 90's, bought used, of course. It was running AIX 2.x. I moved on to Linux pretty quick.

Just like NT4 Server :-)

Intended use vs. potential use.

And yeah, NT4 Server was just NT4 Workstation with some registry fiddly bits flipped.

Right; NT was and is likewise quite capable of being a desktop or server OS, the difference is that MS actually pushed that and NT 10.0 is still actively used in both contexts.

>Where are you getting this information?

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.

An interesting footnote is that installing the web browser package on AIX caused a telemetry dial-home to Big Blue. I found this because it was keeping our ISDN BRI leased line up constantly and costing us money. Blocking that address solved it.

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