

TIL: There used to be an Internet Explorer for Unix - derpenxyne
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_UNIX

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jgw
There was also an early version of Windows Media Player for Linux - complete
with a spiffy Motif interface!

And there was a DEC Alpha port of Windows NT.

[EDIT: I don't believe it was called "Windows Media Player" exactly, but it
was a media player for x86 Linux from Microsoft. Can't find a link to it after
a cursory search, but it did exist - I used it]

~~~
yangyang
There were NT ports to MIPS and PowerPC too.

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cmbaus
I think NT was originally developed on MIPS and ported to x86.

~~~
jensnockert
It was originally developed for a Microsoft internal Intel i860 workstation,
that's also from where the name NT comes from.

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tibbon
And there used to be Microsoft Unix distribution
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix>).

~~~
fulafel
And Microsoft used to develop on Unix and cross-compile to PC.

~~~
tibbon
And there was DOS for Apple computers...

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xSwag
Please keep stuff like this limited to Reddit. If I wanted to see "TIL" I
would browse /r/todayilearned not Hacker News.

~~~
pyre
\- Meta comments like this aren't always useful discussion.

\- There is a flag option on a story. If enough people agree with you, then it
will affect change.

\- It doesn't make the front page of HN unless it gets upvoted, so obviously
there are HN users that disagree with you.

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hapless
I've actually used this, and IE5 was by far the best/fastest browser on
Solaris at the time. Seriously an order of magnitude faster than Netscape 4.x.
With IE, browsing the web was practical on a 100 MHz SPARC.

IE for UNIX was ported by Mainsoft, now more famous for leaking the Windows NT
source code.

It also came bundled with an Outlook Express-like mail client, but I never
tried it.

~~~
vonmoltke
Indeed. This was my go-to browser on the SPARC pizza boxes in my university's
engineering labs

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DanBC
It's been mentioned on HN a few times too:

(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1739296>)

(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3334210>)

I posted that link too! (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4562692>)

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mathnode
Adobe Photoshop 3 was released for Solaris

Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere all were released for IRIX. It's almost
as if IRIX and Solaris used to have a very large workstation customer base
then everything was migrated to NT, Mac, and Linux, how spooky those crazy
expensive workstations didn't stay viable for long. O-M-G girlfriend, history
is like totally repeating itself!

~~~
hapless
The Adobe suite on IRIX/Solaris used a really clumsy macintosh-to-motif auto-
port system. The resulting ports were _really bad_.

Before Photoshop on Macintosh, the normal way to do that type of work on a
computer was to buy a turnkey system from BarcoColor or similar. Yes, the
bundled UNIX workstation might run IRIX, but it was turnkey -- the end user
just wanted to run Barco.

Photoshop on a Mac IIfx cost about 1/10th as much and was at least half as
good. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the bottom dropped out of the turnkey market for
photoshop-type tasks.

(For video, it stayed alive and well for many more years: discreet was selling
IRIX turnkey up until 2004 or so)

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ben1040
Looking at the version history, I totally forgot about the early days of the
web when browsers by default only came with 40-bit encryption because of US
export regulations.

