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Has anyone here ever used Windows NT on a DEC Alpha? A company in Ireland I worked for gave a mobile phone GIS demo to the Irish national phone company and Dig

Has anyone here ever used Windows NT on a DEC Alpha? A company in Ireland I worked for gave a mobile phone GIS demo to the Irish national phone company and Digital lent us a beefy server with two AXP CPUs (it was gonna be the future!) running windows NT. We literally pulled it on cobbled dublin streets on a a handcart to bring it to their offices.

avidphantasm 4y ago
Back around 2001, I bought a secondhand Alpha ATX mobo and for a lark installed NT 4 on it. I didn’t do much with it though.
jamesfinlayson 4y ago
What was the overlap of both products being commercially available? I didn't think it was too long.
- peteri 4y ago
  Wikipedia says it was only commercially available for NT4, I do somewhere have the Dec Alpha Windows 2000 beta discs (It got killed very late in the beta).
  - toast0 4y ago
    A friend of mine had an Alpha, and I was getting the Windows betas (I got 98se, 2000, and XP, and then nothing else). My friend was really happy to 'borrow' the win2k for alpha discs. IIRC, release candidates 1 and 2 had alpha discs, and then 3 and beyond didn't; but I might be off by one. I assume it would have shipped as part of the release if only Alpha was cancelled a couple months later.
    - p_l 4y ago
      IIRC every RC disk had alpha binaries, only the RTM and later doesn't - because Alpha getting canned was declared in the short window between last RC and RTM, in a rather abrupt manner to everyone involved on the project.
      - toast0 4y ago
        https://www.theregister.com/2000/12/27/win2k_for_alpha_alive_well/ https://www.theregister.com/2000/12/27/win2k_for_alpha_alive... Seems to indicate that the Release Candidate 3 builds for Alpha never made it out through official channels. I'm pretty sure beta and RC was one disc per flavor and architecture though: so x86 professional, x86 server, etc, and alpha pro/server/etc. A big bundle of discs would come from Redmond. I know nt4 had all the archs on the release disc, but I don't think that was the plan for win2k
gavanm 4y ago
In the mid-90's, I worked at a place that had one used for our intranet server running Win NT with IIS. Mostly used a DEC Alpha as a "visible" competitor to our major server provider at the time (Compaq) to try and manage the prices they were charging (at least until Compaq bought Digital, and then eventually bought by/merged with HP). One interesting thing was that we had a faulty RAM chip that we only discovered due to a bug in website publishing to IIS causing a big memory leak which crashed the server. Once the the chip was replaced, we still had the underlying leak - but at least the server didn't crash any more.
oakwhiz 4y ago
Hand delivering servers and other gear is always a part of a good story. Makes me wish for a decent cart and maybe some brakes.
EvanAnderson 4y ago
I had a Customer in 2000 using SQL Server 7.0 on Windows NT 4.0 on an Alphaserver 1200. The performance, as compared to contemporary x86 machines, was very good. Was it worth the cost? I don’t know. I never did a dollars to performance benchmark. I suspect it wasn’t really worth the DEC tax.
icedchai 4y ago
In 1998-99, I worked at a company where we had an Alpha running Windows NT Server. The company was a large DEC customer and we had tons of Alpha servers sitting around.
olvy0 4y ago
Me, as a QA in Microsoft. I assume other groups in Microsoft at the time were running it too. I wrote a bit about that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27639461 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27639461
13of40 4y ago
I had one for running very early builds of Win64 at Microsoft. It was a very aesthetically pleasing piece of hardware. The builds of Windows I ran on it were truly at the stage of "hey it built" so I remember getting a dialog one time that said something like "Invalid Error Code" with half the warning icon rendered and the other half random garbage. We moved on to IA64 and AMD64 shortly afterwards.
p_l 4y ago
I recall my father mentioning having an Alpha with Windows NT4 available at work, circa ~1998. This was probably explicitly to run computational packages like ANSYS. It wasn't main work machine, which AFAIK was something more like random Pentium, maybe Pentium Pro (doubtful - I think there was a dual Pentium Pro which was similarly a shared machine but not daily driver)
ggm 4y ago
I worked briefly on a real-estate web system which ran on it. It wasn't bad, as these things go (I was coming off OSF/1)
nikau 4y ago
Only once for around a week, we purchased a alphaserver and it didn't come with the correct OSF/1 installation media, so one of the guys installed NT4 just to see what its like - we were all impressed as it ran multiple copies of Doom without issue.
acdha 4y ago
Yes – back in the 90s, my first tech job was doing QA for a COBOL vendor and we had that on our support matrix. The Alpha processors were really fast but did you ever know there was A VERY SERIOUS COMPUTER in that room with the industrial fans and a case like a filing cabinet which probably weighed 50 pounds empty. We even for a time had an Alpha on Linux build for a single customer.

avidphantasm 4y ago

Back around 2001, I bought a secondhand Alpha ATX mobo and for a lark installed NT 4 on it. I didn’t do much with it though.

jamesfinlayson 4y ago

What was the overlap of both products being commercially available? I didn't think it was too long.

peteri 4y ago
Wikipedia says it was only commercially available for NT4, I do somewhere have the Dec Alpha Windows 2000 beta discs (It got killed very late in the beta).
- toast0 4y ago
  A friend of mine had an Alpha, and I was getting the Windows betas (I got 98se, 2000, and XP, and then nothing else). My friend was really happy to 'borrow' the win2k for alpha discs. IIRC, release candidates 1 and 2 had alpha discs, and then 3 and beyond didn't; but I might be off by one. I assume it would have shipped as part of the release if only Alpha was cancelled a couple months later.
  - p_l 4y ago
    IIRC every RC disk had alpha binaries, only the RTM and later doesn't - because Alpha getting canned was declared in the short window between last RC and RTM, in a rather abrupt manner to everyone involved on the project.
    - toast0 4y ago
      https://www.theregister.com/2000/12/27/win2k_for_alpha_alive_well/ https://www.theregister.com/2000/12/27/win2k_for_alpha_alive... Seems to indicate that the Release Candidate 3 builds for Alpha never made it out through official channels. I'm pretty sure beta and RC was one disc per flavor and architecture though: so x86 professional, x86 server, etc, and alpha pro/server/etc. A big bundle of discs would come from Redmond. I know nt4 had all the archs on the release disc, but I don't think that was the plan for win2k

gavanm 4y ago

In the mid-90's, I worked at a place that had one used for our intranet server running Win NT with IIS. Mostly used a DEC Alpha as a "visible" competitor to our major server provider at the time (Compaq) to try and manage the prices they were charging (at least until Compaq bought Digital, and then eventually bought by/merged with HP). One interesting thing was that we had a faulty RAM chip that we only discovered due to a bug in website publishing to IIS causing a big memory leak which crashed the server. Once the the chip was replaced, we still had the underlying leak - but at least the server didn't crash any more.

oakwhiz 4y ago

Hand delivering servers and other gear is always a part of a good story. Makes me wish for a decent cart and maybe some brakes.

EvanAnderson 4y ago

I had a Customer in 2000 using SQL Server 7.0 on Windows NT 4.0 on an Alphaserver 1200. The performance, as compared to contemporary x86 machines, was very good. Was it worth the cost? I don’t know. I never did a dollars to performance benchmark. I suspect it wasn’t really worth the DEC tax.

icedchai 4y ago

In 1998-99, I worked at a company where we had an Alpha running Windows NT Server. The company was a large DEC customer and we had tons of Alpha servers sitting around.

olvy0 4y ago

Me, as a QA in Microsoft. I assume other groups in Microsoft at the time were running it too. I wrote a bit about that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27639461 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27639461

13of40 4y ago

I had one for running very early builds of Win64 at Microsoft. It was a very aesthetically pleasing piece of hardware. The builds of Windows I ran on it were truly at the stage of "hey it built" so I remember getting a dialog one time that said something like "Invalid Error Code" with half the warning icon rendered and the other half random garbage. We moved on to IA64 and AMD64 shortly afterwards.

p_l 4y ago

I recall my father mentioning having an Alpha with Windows NT4 available at work, circa ~1998. This was probably explicitly to run computational packages like ANSYS. It wasn't main work machine, which AFAIK was something more like random Pentium, maybe Pentium Pro (doubtful - I think there was a dual Pentium Pro which was similarly a shared machine but not daily driver)

ggm 4y ago

I worked briefly on a real-estate web system which ran on it. It wasn't bad, as these things go (I was coming off OSF/1)

nikau 4y ago

Only once for around a week, we purchased a alphaserver and it didn't come with the correct OSF/1 installation media, so one of the guys installed NT4 just to see what its like - we were all impressed as it ran multiple copies of Doom without issue.

acdha 4y ago

Yes – back in the 90s, my first tech job was doing QA for a COBOL vendor and we had that on our support matrix. The Alpha processors were really fast but did you ever know there was A VERY SERIOUS COMPUTER in that room with the industrial fans and a case like a filing cabinet which probably weighed 50 pounds empty. We even for a time had an Alpha on Linux build for a single customer.