NT
Bill is invading, Bill is invaded, Bill is!
1. I'm not sure what's up with DEC and C= other than that they're working
on something which is supposed to see the light of day in a few years and
be really expensive. And yah I hope that the Alpha is one of the chips
the Amiga OS is ported to.
2&3. Uh uh. The PowerPC chip is new, not compatible with anything,
though it is based on the RS/6000 line of workstations from IBM. However,
IBM and Apple have already pretty much finished the PowerOpen OS, the
details of which I am not sure of, but it's some sort of framework unix
arrangement that will run Mac and Windows and other stuff in different
windows. Since Apple has already ported the Mac Toolbox to (I think) a
hardware independant level, Mac apps will run pretty quickly on PowerPC
chips. As to NT running on the PowerPC – possible, but I doubt it,
because IBM and Apple are both competing _AGAINST_ MSoft. And the last
thing I'd want to see on an Amiga is NT – it has plenty of shortcomings, I
like the Amiga OS (though there's plenty of room for improvement) and if
an Amiga ran NT, it would just be another NT box, requiring marketing
abilities of C= that C= doesn't have. And frankly, I haven't seen
multi-tasking to compete with the Amiga's from a one-machine end-user's
perspective. From a programmer's perspective, we need memory management
to allow protected multi-tasking, but the performance we have whips the
hell out of OS/2.
4. Be a BridgeBoard type solution I expect, although I've been told clone
DOS at least could be implemented _very_ cheaply at the hardware level.
Still, some fringe nut from C= (I hope he was a fringe nut, though he
otherwise sounded knowledgable and was minding the 4000T demo) at WOCA
mentioned NT as a possible future OS running on an Amiga. Gag!
Well, them's my thots
Paul