From: david+usenet@zx.net.nz   
      
   In article , bill.gunshannon@gmail.com   
   says...   
   >   
   > On 10/1/2025 12:52 AM, David Goodwin wrote:   
   > >   
   > >   
   > > In the 90s Windows NT was only released for IBM PC compatibles, and   
   > > platforms which conformed (to varying degrees) to the ARC standard.   
   > > Later from the 2000 after ARC ceased to be relevant, EFI was adopted as   
   > > a new standard.   
   > >   
   >   
   > I seem to remember NT coming with a list of supported hardware   
   > and if you had otherwise MS did not guarantee it would run at   
   > all, much less perform acceptably.   
      
   Yeah, the Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) told you machines (or other   
   hardware) Windows NT was *known* to be compatible with - it had been   
   tested and should work fine. Anything not on the list came down to   
   whether the vendor had written drivers for it since the version of   
   Windows NT you're running came out. It took a while for some vendors to   
   start building NT drivers, and not all bothered until it started to   
   become more widespread with Windows 2000 and XP.   
      
   For RISC machines, the HCL mattered more. Rather than aiming to   
   standardise hardware under the ARC standard as PC vendors did under the   
   "IBM PC compatible" de facto standard, a lot of RISC vendors just relied   
   on using Windows NT's Hardware Abstraction Layer to paper over any   
   deviations from the ARC standard or prior machines they may have   
   produced. Each new machine got a new HAL module, and without one of   
   those Windows NT probably wouldn't even boot.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)