I’m probably missing sufficient context but this quote suggests a more involved route
[0]
DEC approached Apple wondering if they might be interested in a high-performance ARM, to which the Apple engineers replied "Phhht, yeah. You can’t do it, but, yeah, if you could we'd use it."
I assume they're referring to [0] which notes that ARM Holdings was co-founded by Acorn, Apple and VLSI. I don't think the comment in that StrongARM article is unreasonable given the state of technology at the time - as a bystander it seems like ARM competing with x86 in performance has only really become possible in the last few years.
If I can’t ask for the budget available for any Windows project _for tooling and libraries ^0 I never really know how much of a problem was it being a Windows project. Even then I used to like to ask about experiences with a handful of different parts of the windows systems which frequently suggested that either the programmer was pretty new to windows or that something was amiss, it was usually my experience to find more unix talent avoiding windows by default and at least with a BSD tcp stack and any communications project, windows jobs kept turning out to be for executive management demonstration purposes which was a very important opportunity for getting into more significant financial programming work.
What sold me on NT 3.1 was the in-the-box Microsoft Transaction Server.
MTS is the single largest reason why SQLServer_Linux was a shoehorn refit, not anything like the job that it could have been.
Out of the box CICS interop was bigger than my memory of the first browsers for W/NT. Want to trade with the world and speak EDIFACT, or do X.500 real money movement? You had codes running before you could put the screws on your local IBM account rep to get out of bed for you.
I last looked at HN just as Lockdown was announced in England. The last discussion I perused was showing a project that provided secure remote access to sensitive ports. Which I think is stable CICS fayre since about ‘85 on the cross platform side I would guess at least twenty years older for anything/360.
