I’m always curious how these projects come about and survive: why go to all of the effort to port for a dead-end product line? As technically sweet as it is? I imagine they would’ve found a decent market if they’d ported to Power Mac.
(Also, was the x86 emulation implemented in-house? I wouldn’t be surprised if some niche small company had a x86 emulator for PPC product that they could be paid to port.)
The plan was for all operating systems on top of IBM's POWER/PPC hardware to be rehosted as "personalities" on top of the Workplace OS microkernel, but in the end, OS/2 was the only personality that saw any real work.
The Workplace OS would also have been used on Apple hardware as part of the abortive Taligent project.
(It also would have been used on x86 and other platforms, but they started with PPC)
In reality, in some ways we are there now. I'm wondering if we can say that the "workplace OS" can simply viewed as a hypervisor and the "personalities" that run on top it are simply VMs (perhaps being paravirtualized).
I think oddities like this were a consequence of a hardware world that was rocketing along the heart of Moore’s Law, alongside a software world that hadn’t matured past multi-year product cycles.
When OS/2 for PowerPC was set in motion, that Intel would “Make CISC Great Again” with the Pentium was far from clear.
I remember that the "general consensus" was that RISC was gonna win, it was just a matter of when (and when it could be affordable). What was NOT certain was which RISC architecture would come out ahead, so there was a bunch of porting to "remove the risk" - later they would unport most everything and "remove the RISC".
Pentium shook that tree a bit, and Pentium II really razzle-dazzled it.
Well, the thing is that RISC did win. It is just that the RISC that won is the one that Intel baked into their x86 chips.
The Pentium introduced the idea of micro op codes though the Pentium Pro was the first chip to really run with it. The CISC x86 instructions were converted into simpler instructions internally. These micro op codes could be pipe-lined, executed in parallel, and executed out-of-order.
If the Pentium II really razzle-dazzled, it did it with RISC architecture at its core. The CISC instruction decoder added a bit of die size but that did not matter much and Intel had leading-edge manufacturing tech.
The internal parallelism was also put to good use by adding SIMD instructions (MMX). These first appeared in the Pentium MMX and Pentium II but the Pentium III did it much better and of course Intel has continued to add more powerful SIMD stuff over time.
RISC did not win only inside Intel chips of course. Every successful ISA since the 90's has been RISC including ARM and RISC-V. But even RISC chips feature some complex instructions these days.
I'd argue (to some extent) that the proliferation of SIMD instructions demonstrates that RISC did lose, not just the practical war, but also the conceptual one. i.e. we creates many many similiar instructions today, which seems to go against the ethos of RISC.
I'm not sure I agree with "dead end" outside of the benefit of hindsight, or maybe don't get the point you're making. Neither the PowerPC nor OS/2 were dead-end in 1995, and competition in the OS space was still happening. Why wouldn't IBM want to have PowerPC survive, let alone thrive, with OS options? And surely they'd have loved something to take on Microsoft at this point in history.
I believe the Support Elements for some IBM zSeries mainframes were ThinkPad laptops with PowerPC CPUs running OS/2.
There was definitely VirtualPC for PowerPC Macs, I used it to run TurboTax way back in the day.