Years ago when I’d bought Office 4.2 for Windows NT, it only included i386 & Alpha builds of Word and Excel in the box, and a coupon for MIPS and PowerPC.
About the only thing interesting is that it actually ran under Win32s.
But today looking at term24‘s uploads on archive.org, I saw two CD-ROM images:
I quickly fired up Qemu MIPS NT, and confirmed that both do in fact contain a MIPS version! Excel does have the PowerPC version as well.
As far as I know the only RISC platform to get apps from Office 97 was the Dec Alpha, but at least MIPS users can rejoice now, knowing that they too have been blessed with 32bit Office 4.2 apps!
One of the amazing things about NT & portable apps is that visually, they look identical. So other than me telling you that these are the MIPS native versions, there really is no way to tell.
Well, other than there is no ntvdm running. There is no WOW needed here!
100% native.
I guess the only other question is that since the Word is 1994, and Excel is from 1995, did they have earlier versions for Windows NT? It seems like everything was finally coming together for RISC NT, except the users. Would a release of 64bit Windows 2000 on Dec Alpha save the platform by bringing a strong 64bit platform with integrated JIT i386 WoW built in? (AXP64 Windows 2000 didn’t use !FX32). I guess we’ll never know.
PowerPC Excel? Now is my Estrella finally going to have something to do!
http://vivapowerpc.eu/20230130-1800_Windows_NT_on_Bull_Estrella
yes! I was surprised this one surfaced, so I had to get the word out asap!
and excel!
About your article on the Bull Estrella.
Actually there are some of them which came with OpenFirmware instead PPCbug.
https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=863851#p863851
We tried to make NT VEENER loader to boot the Bull Estrella, but it wasn’t possible due HAL mismatching/incompatibility (the PowerStack HAL has no idea of OpenFirmware and VEENER memory structures, and the bundled OpenFimware HAL (HALFIRE.dll) knows nothing about the PowerStack chipset).
The RS/6000 43P-140 was also PReP with OpenFirmware, but someone managed to install NT just using the ARC floppy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0fJpd__1K8 . This didn’t work on my 43P-140, but I think my CPU was a different one (mine was the 332 MHz version). I tried using the veener loader, but it wouldn’t work.
Nice find. Now I’m curious. The 2 CDs have file dates later then the Office 4.2 for NT CD. Anyone knows, what was the product, that included these two?
Interesting that they chose to port Office 4.2 instead of Office 95 to PowerPC