4 ms·

Do you have any idea what the installed base of Windows/Alpha was? This is not intended to be insulting, but I don't recall hearing of anybody actually running

Do you have any idea what the installed base of Windows/Alpha was? This is not intended to be insulting, but I don't recall hearing of anybody actually running Windows/alpha -- in my circles, it was just a way to order a workstation w/o paying for a UNIX or VMS license. We ordered all our alphas with windows. This was because we ran FreeBSD/alpha, and didn't want to pay for the DEC UNIX license. So the first thing we'd do when we got a new box was to switch the firmware from ARC to SRM mode and install FreeBSD. I imagine lots of other places did that, but with Linux rather than FreeBSD. I do remember running Windows for a few weeks. FX!32 was really impressive, and it felt like normal x86 windows. I can't recall why I did this .. just playing with the OS, and maybe to see what it might take to get FreeBSD booting from ARC (I was one of the 2 people who did the port of FreeBSD to alpha)

inconceivable 3y ago
i vaguely remember attempting to install NT alpha on a dec workstation for one of my dad's friends who worked for either MSFT or digital or HP or something (he got a copy from work for eval - i think he worked in sales). it didn't work at all, and would hang after the file copy portion of the installer. i tried for an entire day but none of my usual x86 tricks applied so i just gave up.
justin66 3y ago
I supported a few Alpha customers in tech support in the late nineties. Our NT product was the most advanced thing we made (there were Unix and DOS versions as well) and I specifically remember a Unix admin type of guy grumpily observing on a call, "if I have to run Windows I might as well run it on a real computer." That conversation would have been shortly after the merger, but before Compaq started gradually killing everything Alpha related in favor of Itanium. Even if Compaq had a little more foresight on that particular matchup, Alpha could never have survived very long after the HP merger, I guess. HP was already building machines for PA-RISC and Itanium, and then there were the minicomputers... how many processor architectures the world was trying to forget about could one company actually support?

inconceivable 3y ago

i vaguely remember attempting to install NT alpha on a dec workstation for one of my dad's friends who worked for either MSFT or digital or HP or something (he got a copy from work for eval - i think he worked in sales). it didn't work at all, and would hang after the file copy portion of the installer. i tried for an entire day but none of my usual x86 tricks applied so i just gave up.

justin66 3y ago

I supported a few Alpha customers in tech support in the late nineties. Our NT product was the most advanced thing we made (there were Unix and DOS versions as well) and I specifically remember a Unix admin type of guy grumpily observing on a call, "if I have to run Windows I might as well run it on a real computer." That conversation would have been shortly after the merger, but before Compaq started gradually killing everything Alpha related in favor of Itanium. Even if Compaq had a little more foresight on that particular matchup, Alpha could never have survived very long after the HP merger, I guess. HP was already building machines for PA-RISC and Itanium, and then there were the minicomputers... how many processor architectures the world was trying to forget about could one company actually support?