“Let’s get this right. There are no favoured operating systems
in Crusoeland. Transmeta has no instruction set of its own. There’s
nothing to write to. And that code morphing engine hasn’t any
preferences either- so don’t think that’s been tweaked to any
particular operating system. And oh no – certainly not Linux, even
though we’ve got its creator on board, helping to design our code
morphing engine….”
“Of the two processors – and remember as a customer you
don’t automatically buy the rights to tweak it yourself – the
TM5400 has been already specifically tweaked to favour, er? Windows
9x, Transmeta said yesterday….“
“And quite deliberately too, said execs, because Windows 9x is
reliant on 16-bit code. The user interface remains 16-bit, and
readers with long memories will recall how, long ago, Microsoft’s
spin doctors obliged its programmers to rename the Win16Lock()
system call to the more agreeable sounding Win16Mutex(): the
bottleneck which Andrew Schulmann used to demonstrate that the new
Windows was just as suspect as the old Windows in the I/O
department.”