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0 pointsDamogran63y ago0 comments

In a way, it's not much different than when they were porting Windows NT to Dec ALPHA. (But I suspect ARM has legs, where Alpha didn't)

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MBCook3y ago· 2 in thread

Didn’t NT actually start on the Alpha and end up with x86 becoming a co-platform (and later main platform) during development?

hestefisk3y ago

Close. The original NT targeted an experimental Intel cpu called i860 (RISC based) nicknamed “N10”. NT was, according to Wikipedia, a play on words for the target cpu architecture.

From Wikipedia: “One of the original NT developers, Mark Lucovsky, states that the name was taken from the original target processor—the Intel i860, code-named N10 ("N-Ten")”.

NT was always supposed to be multi architecture (MIPS, Alpha, IA-32). I’m not sure what happened to i860.

Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT

MBCook3y ago

That’s right. I forgot a third (failed) processor. Thanks.

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