Monday, February 07, 2005
IBM, Sony, Toshiba to reveal "superbrain chip"
You know what I really like about this? Linux will be running on it within a month of it's release (my speculation) and it will take Microsoft 6000 years to port Windows to it. There is gnashing of teeth in Redmond, and more FUD than ever regarding the evils of open source.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Yeah, that's the first thing I thought about too. But don't forget that NT was also ported to Alpha, MIPS, PowerPC and SPARC. Redmond has not likely forgotten how to port code.
That much said, there is, as you point out, a probability of a Linux port in the near term.
I still respected both Windows and Microsoft at that time. I lusted after an IBM Powerbook laptop after seeing one run NT at a trade show. At the same trade show, Microsoft was demonstrating NT on several other platforms touting (as they had every right to do) that you could achieve platform independence by coding to a Windows standard. Windows had in fact made order out of the chaos that was the DOS interrupt scheme where every device, every driver and half the programs you ran were dependent on the timer interrupt that went off 19 times a second. All it took was for one program or device to slip up and the whole house of cards came tumbling down.
Shortly after that however, something changed. Support for the other architectures was rapidly (it seemed) withdrawn. I've never found out if there is any evidence that this was collusion with Intel, or just Microsoft deciding to cut corners to make their profit margins even more outrageous.
Not only did Windows become suddenly and Intel-only OS, but it seemed to get buggier for a while. My guess was that edge conditions were discovered during the porting process that now go unnoticed until new (Intel) processors, faster bus speeds, different chip-sets ferret them out.
Oh, and don't forget the memo from then IBM CEO (who's name I forget) conceding that even IBM mainframes would one day just be running variations on NT. That went along with IBM giving up on OS/2 for all practical purposes. Maybe we are finally at a turning point where IBM can correct, at least partially, the monster they created with the Intel/Microsoft duopoly. The downside is that it will take two Japanese companies to do it. We learned nothing from the downfall of Detroit I guess.
Naw, Windows became marginally buggier after the non-x86 ports for NT were discontinued mostly due to consolidation of the W98 and NT APIs. Smashing W98 and NT together to produce the new consumer OS had to be an ugly task.
As for the death of OS/2, there's all kinds of reasons for that. IBM hung their hopes on compatibility with 16-bit Windows, which took away the only incentive for the ISV community to write applications for native OS/2. When Microsoft introduced Chicago (which code IBM did not have access to) OS/2 was left out there hanging with the nuns.
Post a Comment