Author: Michael G

It’s Drupal Dev Days week! With Lauri presenting a Keynote there and several people out this week (myself included), it was a quiet week for Experience Builder.

Consequently, it was the first week since the 0.x branch was opened that zero merge requests landed…

Even the weekly meeting was fairly quiet.

But on the other side of the planet, undisturbed by things such as vacation or Drupal Dev Days, Lee “larowlan” made a big push forward on [META] Support component types other than SDC, in his MR where he proposes to already remove the current tight coupling to Single-Directory Components (SDC). That tight coupling obviously needs to be removed, but we needed to start somewhere — SDCs were merely the first step.

Still, even at Drupal Dev Days Burgas, important Experience Builder discussions happened: catch, Alex Pott and Dave “longwave” Long discussed the JSON-based data storage model in depth (that was proposed by Alex “effulgentsia” Bronstein). Some important steps forward were made!

Thanks to Lauri for reviewing this!

• Drupal
• Acquia
• Experience Builder

The most fascinating time for Windows NT were its first few years on the market, when the brand new operating system supported a wide variety of architectures, from default x86, all the way down to stuff like Alpha, MIPS, and exotic things like Intel i860, and even weirder stuff like Clipper (even a SPARC port was planned, but never released). One of the more conventional architectures that saw a Windows NT port – one that was actually released to the public, no less – was PowerPC. The last version of Windows NT to support exotic architectures was 4.0, with Windows 2000 only supporting x86, dropping everything else, including PowerPC (although Windows 2000 for Alpha reached RC1 status). The PowerPC version of Windows NT only supported IBM and Motorola systems using the PowerPC Reference Platform, and never the vastly more popular PowerPC systems from Apple. Well, it’s 2024, and that just changed: Windows NT 4.0 can now be installed and run on certain Apple New World Power Macintosh systems. This repository currently contains the source code for the ARC firmware and its loader, targeting New World Power Macintosh systems using the Gossamer architecture (that is, MPC106 “Grackle” memory controller and PCI host, and “Heathrow” or “Paddington” super-I/O chip on the PCI bus). NT4 only, currently. NT 3.51 may become compatible if HAL and drivers get ported to it. NT 3.5 will never be compatible, as it only supports PowerPC 601. (The additional suspend/hibernation features in NT 3.51 PMZ could be made compatible in theory but in practise would require all of the additional drivers for that to be reimplemented.) ↫ maciNTosh GitHub page This is absolutely wild, and one of the most interesting projects I’ve seen in a long, long time. The deeply experimental nature of this effort does mean that NT 4.0 is definitely not stable on any of the currently supported machines, and the number of drivers implemented is the absolute bare minimum to run NT 4.0 on these systems. It does, however, support dual-booting both NT 4.0 and Mac OS8, 9, and X, which would be quite something to set up. I’m not definitely going to keep an eye on eBay for a supported machine, because running NT on anything other than x86 has always been a bit of a weird fascination for me. Sadly, period-correct PowerPC machines that support NT are extremely rare and thus insanely expensive, and will often require board-level repairs that I can’t perform. Getting a more recent Yikes PowerMac G4 should be easy, since those just materialise out of thin air randomly in the world. I’m incredibly excited about this.