In the late 1990s, there were various rumors about Windows NT on the Macintosh. Most of them didn’t pan out, but with the development this month of a way to run Windows NT 4.0 on a Power Mac to get the reverse Hackintosh you may have had nightmares about, this seems like a good time to revisit those old rumors.
1997 rumors of Windows NT on the Power Macintosh
The rumors really started flying in August 1997, in the aftermath of Microsoft’s $150 million investment in Apple. It’s hard to find anything about that today, because the idea of Apple even considering using Windows NT doesn’t fit the narrative of Steve Jobs going into exile at Next, and then Apple saving itself by buying Next to get its operating system and CEO, and Jobs turning Apple into the most valuable company in the world.
Yeah, but I’ll do Windows!
I can’t find it now, but I distinctly remember a cartoon appearing in a computer magazine. The caption on the cartoon asked which couch cushion Bill Gates lifted up to find the $150 million he invested in Apple. In the panel, Bill Gates said, “It was under here. The maid probably would have grabbed it.” And on the other side of the panel was Steve Jobs, who retorted, “Yeah, but I’ll do Windows!”
John C Dvorak taking it a step further
In the November 4, 1997 issue of PC Magazine, John C Dvorak said he was hearing that Apple would start using the Windows NT kernel in Macs soon, and might even switch to Intel processors. The problem with Dvorak’s argument is he also said the operating system that would become Mac OS 10 already ran on Intel. So he didn’t do much for his argument to that Apple was going to be using Windows NT. The switch to Intel eventually happened, but not NT.
I remember reading better arguments than Dvorak’s, but like I said, they’re hard to find now. Apple did switch to Intel, but didn’t do anything with NT.
I will say that all of the rumors I remember hearing were from PC oriented publications. I was not reading Mac publications at the time, so it could be that the Microsoft echo chamber was speculating and Steve Jobs never talked about Windows NT.
The modern account of the complex Apple/Microsoft relationship
The modern version of the story is that Apple took Microsoft’s money in 1997, and there was actually an even larger, undisclosed payment involved, and when the US Department of Justice went to Steve Jobs and asked what could be done about Microsoft’s monopoly, Steve Jobs’ answer was to tie Microsoft up in court for a couple of years to give him time to figure out what he needed to do.
Personally, for whatever it’s worth, I think Microsoft was more interested in Windows NT on the Macintosh than Apple ever was. After all, Windows NT did run on PowerPC CPUs. It just didn’t work on Apple’s computers running PowerPC CPUs.
Although I did hear a rumor contrary to that as well.
Rumors that Windows NT already ran on Mac hardware
In 1999, I took a multi-day class on upgrading and repairing Macintoshes. We covered the things a ’90s Mac tech needed to know, like how to troubleshoot extensions and how to bless and curse system folders. I still remember a lot, but there’s one weird thing that came up that I hadn’t thought about in a long time.
We spent an afternoon talking about CPU architecture, and how Macs originally used Motorola 68k CPUs for around 10 years before switching to the PowerPC CPU. That is important because the two CPUs are not directly compatible. The PowerPC could emulate the 68k CPUs because they were faster, but emulating the PowerPC on a 68K CPU would be far too slow to be practical, and Apple did not provide a way to do that. And for that matter, running 68k code on a PowerPC was not as fast as running native code, so he really didn’t recommend doing that on a regular basis. If you ran native PowerPC applications on a PowerPC Mac, you would be much happier with the result.
He pointed out as an aside that Apple wasn’t the only company that used PowerPC, and Windows NT ran on PowerPC CPUs. Then he said that it was possible to run Windows NT on a Mac, but version 4 wouldn’t install directly. The trick, he claimed, was to install one of the earlier versions of Windows NT and then upgrade to NT4.
I know now that what he said in class wasn’t true in 1998. But it is possible now. And the thing that makes it possible now tells me that what I heard in 1998 was not at all true. But nobody ever called him out on it because it was hard enough to verify. Not a lot of people had a copy of NT 3.5 or 3.51 around to try. Even fewer had any desire to do so.
Windows NT4 on a Power Mac today
When Microsoft built Windows NT for PowerPC, their target was workstations manufactured by IBM or Motorola. These computers use a firmware called Arc. Apple used a different type called Open Firmware.
The difference is somewhat similar to the difference between a traditional BIOS on a PC and UEFI. Modern Windows prefers UEFI but can boot and run on either. But you won’t be able to run Windows NT 4.0 or Windows 95 on a UEFI system. They don’t support UEFI. And Windows NT4 didn’t support Open Firmware.
The MaciNTosh project to get Windows NT running on Power Mac hardware includes a variant of the Arc firmware made compatible with certain PowerPC Macs, loads the firmware into memory, and then uses that firmware to load Windows NT. Between that and some device drivers, it is now possible to install Windows NT 4.0 on certain Macintoshes, with a number of caveats.
Hardware caveats
The first is it generally only supports the translucent G3 and G4 era machines, and only a subset of those. Windows NT didn’t support USB, so if the machine didn’t have ADB on the motherboard or a way to add it, you can’t get through the installation.
It also doesn’t support SCSI, so you have to use IDE, and you have to be careful not to be connecting to an ATA66 controller.
Stability caveats
And if you get past all of those pitfalls, it is still not very stable. It is prone to crash during installation, and it can take several tries to get it installed. I hope you enjoy blue screens on your bondi blue Mac hardware. But once it does manage to install and boot, it is not necessarily any less stable than Windows NT service pack 1 or service pack 2 was on any other architecture.
But that is another downside. Service pack 3 was the first version of NT4 that was really stable enough to be practical. And service pack 3 was never released for PowerPC, only x86 and Alpha CPUs.
What’s Windows NT on a Power Mac good for?
But you can do some mildly interesting or amusing things with Windows NT on a Power Mac. The PowerPC version did include emulation for 16-bit x86, so you can run 16-bit Windows and even DOS software on it, although the speed isn’t likely to amaze you and it can be prone to crashing.
Motorola released a PowerPC version of Soft Windows, which extends the x86 emulation to 32-bit Windows applications compiled for x86. This runs just fine on a Mac running NT4. You still can’t run anything that needs serive pack 3 or later, but early 32-bit Windows applications will run. Microsoft Office 95 should work.
Very few programs were ever compiled for Windows NT on PowerPC, so this is way more interesting than it is practical. And that is while acknowledging there are people who won’t find it interesting.
But at least it answers a question from 26 years ago that I had forgotten about. And if enough drivers get written for it, it might get more interesting, even if it’s not likely to ever be practical. But it doesn’t have to be practical to be fun. I don’t have any late 90s Mac hardware, so I won’t be running a reverse Hackintosh. But if I did have any, this is exactly what I’d do with it.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.