[gaius]

I'm guessing you're very young. NT used to be available on x86, MIPS, AXP and PowerPC. It was developed not on x86 but on i960, a RISC processor from Intel. There were plans for a SPARC version too but endianness issues in the HAL meant it was never performant.

The only reason Windows only runs on x86/x64 now is that customers weren't interested in it on other platforms. Microsoft really tried to make it cross platform.

[rbanffy]

> Microsoft really tried to make it cross platform.

They just forgot to port Office. IIRC, the then-current release of Visual Studio would run on x86 but compile to supported RISC platforms. That turned it into a server-only platform. No Office and no development tools before the dawn of the web application means certain desktop doom.

[pohl]

There are alternate histories regarding that: like how non x86 versions of NT were subpar and had a dearth of available software, and likely only existed to freeze the market for open-systems unix vendors, all of which had those CPU architectures as a strategic advantage.

[rbanffy]

I played with NT on Alpha. It was a blazing-fast workstation that had almost no software except Softimage.

Lack of Office killed the desktop Windows on RISC.

On PPC, I remember SQL Server had some weird network bugs too.

[wallflower]

Highly recommend the book "Showstoppers" about Dave Cutler and the making of Windows NT