TIL: There used to be an Internet Explorer for Unix | Hacker News Reader

TIL: There used to be an Internet Explorer for Unix

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23 pointsderpenxyne19 comments

There was also an early version of Windows Media Player for Linux - complete with a spiffy Motif interface!

And there was a DEC Alpha port of Windows NT.

[EDIT: I don't believe it was called "Windows Media Player" exactly, but it was a media player for x86 Linux from Microsoft. Can't find a link to it after a cursory search, but it did exist - I used it]

There were NT ports to MIPS and PowerPC too.

I think NT was originally developed on MIPS and ported to x86.

Dave Cutler was very fond of MIPS and worked on that port, but I think it was done concurrently with the x86 version.

I don't think this is true. From what I can figure out, Windows was ported to MIPS, but had always been first done on intel hardware.

Do you have a link or reference for this? Curious.

It was originally developed for a Microsoft internal Intel i860 workstation, that's also from where the name NT comes from.

And there used to be Microsoft Unix distribution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix).

And Microsoft used to develop on Unix and cross-compile to PC.

And there was DOS for Apple computers...

Please keep stuff like this limited to Reddit. If I wanted to see "TIL" I would browse /r/todayilearned not Hacker News.

Why? It's a relevant article. If the 'TIL' itself annoys you then that's your problem. There is no correct way to do language, especially on the internet.

- Meta comments like this aren't always useful discussion.

- There is a flag option on a story. If enough people agree with you, then it will affect change.

- It doesn't make the front page of HN unless it gets upvoted, so obviously there are HN users that disagree with you.

Apologies if that offends you, if I could still edit the title to appease you, I would.

I've actually used this, and IE5 was by far the best/fastest browser on Solaris at the time. Seriously an order of magnitude faster than Netscape 4.x. With IE, browsing the web was practical on a 100 MHz SPARC.

IE for UNIX was ported by Mainsoft, now more famous for leaking the Windows NT source code.

It also came bundled with an Outlook Express-like mail client, but I never tried it.

Indeed. This was my go-to browser on the SPARC pizza boxes in my university's engineering labs

It's been mentioned on HN a few times too:

(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1739296)

(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3334210)

I posted that link too! (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4562692)

Adobe Photoshop 3 was released for Solaris

Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere all were released for IRIX. It's almost as if IRIX and Solaris used to have a very large workstation customer base then everything was migrated to NT, Mac, and Linux, how spooky those crazy expensive workstations didn't stay viable for long. O-M-G girlfriend, history is like totally repeating itself!

The Adobe suite on IRIX/Solaris used a really clumsy macintosh-to-motif auto-port system. The resulting ports were really bad.

Before Photoshop on Macintosh, the normal way to do that type of work on a computer was to buy a turnkey system from BarcoColor or similar. Yes, the bundled UNIX workstation might run IRIX, but it was turnkey -- the end user just wanted to run Barco.

Photoshop on a Mac IIfx cost about 1/10th as much and was at least half as good. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the bottom dropped out of the turnkey market for photoshop-type tasks.

(For video, it stayed alive and well for many more years: discreet was selling IRIX turnkey up until 2004 or so)

Looking at the version history, I totally forgot about the early days of the web when browsers by default only came with 40-bit encryption because of US export regulations.

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