Yessiree! Native NT PPC Office apps. Rare birds indeed!

Native Excel and Word?

Yes, I had a PPC Thinkpad with NT and Office.

40p is a PReP machine. The problem is that it doesn’t emulate the little endian mode. Some other PPC machines do, so it might be possible, but no one was interested enough to implement it.

Of course the best way would be a port of some other compiler as given here for the known and widespread GCC.

The referenced, compressed TAR contains something interesting. Maybe somebody with (real or emulated) hardware could get running the C 4.0 or C++ 4.1 compiler with these information. I lack any kind of hardware and time. Let’s take a look at the ppc specific lines:

$ cat ./teamware/license_dir/license.dat | grep ppc | awk ‘{print $1″ “$2” “$3” “$4” “$5” “$6” (…) “$(NF-1)” “$NF}’
FEATURE proworks.teamware.ppc suntechd 1.000 01-jan-0 0 (…) sun.com” ANY
INCREMENT procompiler.c.ppc suntechd 4.000 01-jan-0 0 (…) sun.com” ANY
INCREMENT procompiler.cc.ppc suntechd 4.100 01-jan-0 0 (…) sun.com” ANY
INCREMENT proworks.tools.ppc suntechd 3.000 01-jan-0 0 (…) sun.com” ANY
INCREMENT proworks.common.ppc suntechd 0.000 01-jan-0 0 (…) sun.com” ANY
INCREMENT proworks.mpmt.ppc suntechd 1.000 01-jan-0 0 (…) sun.com” ANY

These F/I lines looking as if these are from an early release of Sun WorkShop 4.0. Field #2 is the product name all suffixed with “.ppc” (platform) with features/increments for TeamWare SCM, C, C++, IDE and tools (dmake etc), license mgr (FlexLM), iMPact (multi-proc/multi-threading). Field #5 represents the date of expiration for F/I, but the string “01-jan-0” is also the placeholder of “never expires”. Field #6 stands for count of RTU’s, “0” stating unlimited. The field next to last containing the domain where the compiler has to be running under (looks like some SUN-internal license). ANYbody from ANYhost can use the feature/increment.

Cheers.

In ’93 I sysadmined at a place where the secretaries used emacs and TeX! They did computational fluid dynamics. The user manual was all TeX with lots of embedded postscript color graphics.

We had SGI Irix 4 & 5 (our software was on the cover of one of their brochures), SunOS, Solaris 2.2, Solborne, Sun3, Sun4 VME, Intergraph, VAX, intel i860 cube, HP 700, HP 800, AIX & RS/6000, Alpha. Tektronix 88000, Apollo DN10000, a deskside Cray, a NeXT cube.

Mostly it was Sun Sparc 1, 2, 10 running SunOS and SGI indigo. We had early SGI Indys that ran Mosaic and an Onyx w/ 4 cpus. I think the RS/6000 had the most RAM at 64MB.

I had to compile & install most of the GNU suite + LaTeX on most of them.

See the NT 4.0 readme.wri under “Microsoft Excel 5.0 for Windows NT”

Some old professional software usually ends up cracked or dumped online (FlexLM is notoriously weak). IRIX is the UNIX most famous for this due to the use of SGI machines for 3d work and the fact that warez groups saw SGI machines as “cool” back in the day.

Solaris SPARC, AIX, and HP-UX have pirated software available in various amounts as well, while Tru64 is literally a desolate wasteland aside from Open Genera (which 9 times out of 10 does not want to work and nobody who got it working even remembers how). I doubt there’s much for SCO or x86 Solaris.

All of these platforms do have compilers of some sort, along with GCC ports.

There was in fact a CHRP version of MacOS and the idea later on was that Mac clones were going to run it instead of being locked solely to Tanzania or similar Apple boards. This was killed of course when Steve Jobs came back and declared Apple was now a Facebook machine company. Still the ROM in RAM concept persisted into the New World mac machines.

One website did get access to a Starmax that was CHRP based and while they never photographed the machine, they did write about what it was like to use it.

https://www.macobserver.com/features/starmax.shtml

“Let it not be said that the Motorola engineers lacked a sense of humor. When we first started up the StarMax 6000 we were greeted with a sort of anti-DOS screen. This was a white screen with black letters that gave boot information at the same time as a very Windows-like start-up trill graced the speakers. This was a very chilling moment for everyone at Webintosh Labs that quickly erupted into gales of laughter. For those of us with heart conditions, the friendly, smiling, happy Welcome To Mac OS screen soon took over and from there on out it was nothing but the usual Mac OS that we all know and love.”

Furthermore Apple apparently was stalling the release of CHRP systems, and System 7.6.1 was the “last” version specifically modified for this.

You might actually know this bizzare trivia thing, but was there ever a version of Microsoft Office for the PowerPC? I had the ‘box’ version that was printed to have all 4 platforms, but a sticker was slapped over that (poorly) that only i386/alpha were in the box. As far as I know the MIPS/PowerPC never shipped.

It’d be interesting to put that one to rest, although the number of people dying to do XL on their PowerPC NT machines is probably lower than OS/2 users using XL for OS/2..