9 ms·

Windows NT 3.1 on Dec Alpha AXP

170 points by jandeboevrie 3y ago

OnlyMortal 3y ago
We had one of those. Very quick though it ended up as a server for mp3 files for the office.
_ph_ 3y ago
I saw once one :) For a very short time, the German computer retail chain "Vobis" would sell Dec Alpha machines with Windows NT 3.1. Too bad that didn't expand later on. It would have been great for the computer market, if more competition to Intel had existed longer.
mega_dingus 3y ago
DEC's relationship with MS was fascinating DEC sued MS due to Cutler's contribution to NT. DEC thought they could sue themselves into MS's good graces. They had embroidered polo shirts saying "Strategic Relationship", and saw several employees wearing them, and the phrase was repeated often DEC couldn't figure out why Office performed worse on Alpha than x86. They sent an employee to MS, only to find MS had a single build server stashed under some desk. MS was compiling Office with -O0, obviously doing the absolute bare minimum to check a box and move on with their lives. Source: I'm a former DEC employee
- hypercube33 3y ago
  Fascinating. Dave over at Dave's Garage on YouTube talks about having a dec I believe -- if what you heard is true I wonder if it was the sole machine you're talking about. Maybe he can shed some light from the other side (Microsoft)
  - maaarghk 3y ago
    IIRC - he mentioned that someone _else_ had a DEC machine, and actually used it as their dev box. The dev with the DEC box person developed the kernel panic code, aka the blue screen of death - and blue was chosen because that's the default screen colour when the DEC box is turned on. The idea was to reset the colour to the default before printing the kernel panic message. So while DEC NT is sort of a footnote, it did have this pretty profound influence : )
    - bitwize 3y ago
      Windows 3.x's fatal exception screens were also blue.
      - chungy 3y ago
        Indeed; I think Windows 2.0 even had it. The story might sound plausible until the holes are poked in the hypothesis.
      - ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
        So were the color schemes on many 8-bit computers of the '80s, such as Ataris and Commodores.
    - jvert 3y ago
      This is a bit of a game of telephone - NT Alpha shipped after NT 3.1 (i386 & Mips) and the port was done almost entirely by DEC. The blue screen preceded the Alpha and was really based on the color scheme from the firmware on the Mips workstation which Microsoft built internally. And, of course, the legendary SlickEdit, which was one of the original editors available on Win32. After NT 3.1, Microsoft assumed primary responsibility for NT Alpha, although there were also some great people at DECWest still involved. source: me, I'm the 'someone _else_' who owned all the Alpha stuff at Microsoft.
- scruffyherder 3y ago
  i'd probably blame the compiler. It's a weird mess of DEC objects being glued together to run on NT (Like the MIPS/PPC ones too). And if you wanted to make anything that for sure ran on all CPU type's you'd build /Od. Doing /O2 or /Ox was a recipe to run nowhere. The real shame is that 64bit beta compiler does such a substantially better job on the Alpha, but like everything else once everything started to gel, it suddenly imploded.
  - mega_dingus 3y ago
    Compiler was definitely somewhat to blame. I was on the C/C++ team at the time, and C++ was definitely an afterthought on the existing C frontend, of a big 3-stage compiler I was on Digital UNIX so I didn't deal with VMS or Windows much. But Digital UNIX couldn't get out of their way with object file formats (COFF vs ELF and whatever else), on top of the compiler inefficiencies A recipe for disaster when the MS company employee doesn't want to do it in the first place, and you give them an artisan product that's hard to use properly
    - scruffyherder 3y ago
      damn so many potential questions, but I don't know if you can answer any as I know most people that were in those pivotal years are so cagey about it.
- fredsmith219 3y ago
  I was running OpenVMS on VAX machines in that era. I couldn’t figure out why DEC wanted NT, a single user operating system, for their mini computers. It made no sense to me. As an aside I had an OpenVMS gig as recently as 2020. It was fun to dust off my old DCL skills.
  - icedchai 3y ago
    I have an Alpha here with OpenVMS! It's fun to play around with. VMS was the first multi-user system I had access to, way back when I was a teenager in the late 80's.
  - tssva 3y ago
    > I couldn’t figure out why DEC wanted NT, a single user operating system, for their mini computers. When did you figure out that NT wasn't a single user operating system?
    - postmodest 3y ago
      NT's support for multiplexed interactive user sessions is piss-poor and has always come with a CAL restriction that was _absurd_. To this day there's no real "multiuser on consoles". (Yes yes, Citrix, rdp, Powershell Remoting, OpenSSH: compare those with X and, I guess, also SSH, and they suck.)
      - tssva 3y ago
        I'm not sure what the requirement for purchasing CALs has to do with whether an OS is multi-user or not. I have administered or been a user of interactive remote NT user session systems going back to beta testing the initial release of WinFrame in the mid 90's. Although worlds better today, I would not have called it pisspoor even then. Today RDS is much more capable than X on a unix system.
        tiahura 3y ago
        As someone else in that space in the mid 90s I would agree that it was pretty remarkable nearly 30 years ago, especially considering the competition.
- eej71 3y ago
  Former VMS user here. The whole "affinity" program that DEC keep pushing just seemed confused and pointless. I think by the time DEC management realized that they had "played themselves" it was too late. And then the Itanium thing happened.
  - panick21_ 3y ago
    > And then the Itanium thing happened. Its still funny to me how Itanium by its announcement basically killed or significantly delayed most other architectures only to turn out to be a dog.
    - hapless 3y ago
      Context is important. All of those competing architectures were becoming prohibitively expensive to enhance. Alpha never paid for itself, ever, the market share was too small. POWER and SPARC had multiple failed projects with enormous capital costs. MIPS hit a performance dead-end with such low market share SGI saw no way to rebuild. HPPA was bleeding HP dry. Itanium may have hastened their demise but all of these archs had the same core problems with investment returns. The writing was on the wall, and Intel was offering something people desperately wanted. (Unfortunately for everyone involved, it did not pan out.)
      - panick21_ 3y ago
        I that understand that context. But even so. POWER and SPARC were continue to be developed. And its hard to argue that either of them should have given up on their architecture. POWER is still developed. It probably made sense for Sun to stop working on SPARC eventually but not when Itanium was announced. Sun problem was just that they spend quite a bit of money, they were just never actually very good at designing processors. SGI was the most aggressive on telling everybody that Itanium would be the future. And they paid for that. They massively delayed MIPS upgrades (only to then start it again once they realized it would take a while for Itanium to come to the market). For a while after this they still made their money on MIPS and all their attempts to push Itanium pretty much fell flat. So arguable it was smart for them to plan to eventually dump MIPS but now how and when they tried to do it (Also I don't disagree that MIPS was a deadend). The deal HP got would have been fantastic if Intel had adopted PA-RISC 64-bit instead of Itanium. Given what happened HP wasn't really competitive with Sun 64-bit SMP servers and Sun made a killing on those things before the bubble. Once they bought Compaq and for a while were selling SMP servers based on Alpha. HP really should have continued to push Alpha after the bought Compaq. The already had VMS ported to Alpha and a large captured base willing to pay a little extra. They aggressively ported VMS to Itanium and thanks to the insane deal they made Intel had to manufacture them processors for a decade+. They are a large enough company and Alpha next few version had the chance to be really great, with things advanced vector extension and they had basically had the best processor team in the world. So yes, it was correct that all these companies wanted to drop their development cost, but doing so before you know really about Itanium and how good it was, that's questionable and messed up all the strategies. There was just an assumption that Itanium was gone be amazing. Granted, VLIW processors were all the hype. Sun also waste a bunch of money on VLIW processor technology in the 90s and unlike HP, they didn't it on Intel. Gordan Bell tried to hook up Alpha with Intel and make Alpha the 64-bit architecture that Intel went with. That would have been quite a different history. But for various reasons this didn't happen, and instead Intel went with HP and their next generation VLIW idea. P.S: It would have been pretty smart of Sun went in on Alpha in 1992, then they could have saved on development threw out the 90s. DEC had built up a huge fabs to handle Alpha but almost nobody bought it. They were really looking for a high value costumer and couldn't find one. Edit: > (Unfortunately for everyone involved, it did not pan out.) Well it wasn't unfortunate for everybody. Sun made quite a bit of money for a few more years with SPARC. And so did IBM with Power. I think those two companies were happy with the Itanium failure.
- Damogran6 3y ago
  The single best x86 computer I've ever used was a Dec Pentium 90...updated eventually to a Pentium II-300. Dec hardware was stupendous. Other systems were (obviously) faster and smaller and probably cooler and more power efficient, but their daughter card implimention of a CPU/RAM upgrade came from their obvious expertise in the Server/Scientific Workstation market with non x-86 architectures.
  - rasz 3y ago
    and resulted in project failure. Grant Saviers was responsible for PC division in early nineties. Oral History of Grant Saviers, part 2 of 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Od830KDrLUU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Od830KDrLUU Oral History of Grant Saviers part 1: http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2012/08/102746014-05-01-acc.pdf http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/201... Oral History of Grant Saviers part 2: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2023/04/102795787-05-01-acc.pdf https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20... >As DEC’s Corporate Vice President of PC Systems and Peripherals from 1990 to 1992 Grant successfully restarted DEC’s PC business from a dormant state and grew revenues to $350M and break-even profitability in 18 months. @18 minute timestamp - they copied DELL strategy and did pretty good, business was growing and then DEC founder and CEO Ken Olsen decided to kill it. Grant got recruited to lead Adaptec.
    - Damogran6 3y ago
      Awww. Boss had a Digital HiNote that seemed like a pretty nifty laptop compared to the competition at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_HiNote#/media/File:DEC_HiNote_Ultra_CS450,_picture_2.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_HiNote#/media/File:DEC...
      - nxobject 3y ago
        What a pity... it seemed like "what should DEC doing in the 90s, and how is it related to DEC's historical identity?" was the question when looking back at their 90's strategy – and it seemed like thoughtfully engineered hardware, even if on a commodity architecture, is one of them. Even if it wasn't the full stack integration from semiconductor fabrication, to OS and networking, that they were used to.
- panick21_ 3y ago
  Yeah that relationship is strange. Seems to me they should have used that Cutler/MICA thing to make a huge amount of money and help their PC division. Not sure exactly what that 'Strategic Relationship' bought them. Seems to me all the companies making partnerships with Microsoft got shafted. Microsoft were always somehow able to use getting sued into making profitable deals for them in the long run. Because most companies didn't want to drive home the dagger, but rather get a few concessions on some kind of partnership.
- sillywalk 3y ago
  Not sure if this is true, but Microsoft(or Cutler) allegedly stole MICA source code and used it NT, which was part of that lawsuit. https://techmonitor.ai/technology/dec_forced_microsoft_into_alliance_with_legal_threat https://techmonitor.ai/technology/dec_forced_microsoft_into_...
spandextwins 3y ago
That’s great! I’ve got an old copy of visual studio and windows nt 3.1 in the closet, ran on mips, alpha, sparc and intel. Back when Microsoft was cross platform.
- luma 3y ago
  They still are, ARM is widely supported. There just aren’t many other platforms in wide use today to target.
- Furball37 3y ago
  I'm 100% sure you're misremembering it running on SPARC, NT never ran on SPARC.
  - dagw 3y ago
    Correct. NT 3.1 ran on x86, Alpha and MIPS. NT 3.5 added PowerPC support. As you say, SPARC was never supported. Windows 2000 had both x86 and Alpha support up through the release candidate, but Alpha was dropped before final release. I actually had an Alpha workstation running Windows 2000 (for fun) back in the mists of time.
    - Furball37 3y ago
      There's also the Beta Whistler AXP64 Build which was used to port Windows over to 64-bit before there was any 64-bit hardware available that could run NT. The people in the virtuallyfun discord got that running (I am part of that! I have an AlphaServer 800 5/500 next to me, with some hacks to the setup and telling it what HAL DLL to load it installed perfectly!)
    - omnibrain 3y ago
      Later there was Windows XP 64-Bit Edition for Itanic Workstations and there was Windows Server up to 2008 R2 for Itanic Servers.
      - scruffyherder 3y ago
h2odragon 3y ago
I had a stack of surplus purchase alphas i used for all sorts of things. All but one of them we put SRM bios on when we got them; but that one was for some reason unable to take it and so was stuck with ARC and (as i recall) wouldn't boot linux. So I gave that one to my teenage nephew, who ran NT on it and became quite the Windows geek with a successful sysadmin career. "I ran NT on Alpha as a teen" is a pretty good resume enhancer, I guess.
- garciasn 3y ago
  I had one of the UDBs back in the late 90s and used it as a MP3 server/foot heater running RH 5.2 (I believe; it's been 25+ years). My wife made me recycle it when we were cleaning out our house before our first child. I should have kept it as a combo doorstop and space heater.
cbm-vic-20 3y ago
I worked at Digital on the Alpha/NT team at the time- the AXP 150 "Jensen" was my daily driver desktop- that machine, like most other DEC hardware, was incredibly well built.
- scruffyherder 3y ago
  Was the HAL really that compilcated? It was listed as one of the reasons why Compaq had bailed on NT. Also were you involved at all with the 64bit versions of NT? It's cool that checked build got out, and kind of funny how the compiler was hiding in plain sight for decades, but glad I spotted it.
- marcellanz 3y ago
  I enjoy to have such a machine as one of the few machines I kept over the years.
panick21_ 3y ago
The more I learn about history of computing, the more it seems like DEC canceling of Project PRISM (and Project MICA) is at the center of a lot of history. Project MICA would have yield a very modern OS that could have supported both Unix and VMS interfaces and it would be only natural to add whatever Windows would come up with in addition to that. That PRISM and MICA seem to be a real paths forward for everything from workstation to multicore servers. We later saw with Alpha what DEC was capable of and PRISM also did a lot of compiler work that was also used for the Alpha compiler later. But that was quite a bit later of course. First of all, Cutler and lots of others went to Microsoft and developed Windows NT. Without Cutler, this project would look very different. Bill Gates was seriously arguing for having no virtual memory on this OS! Absolutely crazy to think what would have happened. If DEC had expanded, rather then contracted its team there, it would have been quite a difference, with two major companies developing a next generation OS in the area. I think DEC was generally more popular for technical people then Microsoft. Then for DEC, their workstation strategy went to MIPS/Ultrix witch was moderately successful but that whole thing was then killed in favor of Alpha/OSF1. This created a lot of bad blood by the people that were stuck on MIPS/Ultrix. DEC was one of the few companies that really went all in on the whole OSF stuff. Just like Sun, it might have been smarter to stick with BSD base rather then System V SVR4 base (love to hear from somebody inside about this topic). Because PRISM didn't happen over the next couple years the VAX line suffered from pretty bad price to performance. Management also seem not committed to VMS as OSF and NT became big parts of their strategy. So this post about running Windows NT+Alpha is really kind of a result of this canceling of PRISM/MICA. I reading some books on DEC now but during some online browsing I found this interesting document from somebody at DEC from late 1994: https://www.dgregscott.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/demise.pdf https://www.dgregscott.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/demise... Gorden Bell's Post Script on 'DEC is Dead, Long Live DEC' was also a great read.
- glhaynes 3y ago
  >Bill Gates was seriously arguing for having no virtual memory on this OS! That’d surprise me. This was a time when one of the major limiting factors to NT adoption was it needing “a lot” of RAM. And he’d had plenty of experience with virtual memory, including his own company’s Xenix and OS/2.
webdoodle 3y ago
After trying and failing to get MS Access to function on a DEC Alpha server, I finally gave up and installed SQL Server. It was a massive performance increase for many reasons, most of which related to MS Access being trash, but the better memory management in SQL server was part of it as well. Sadly MS dropped support for Alpha, and changed the pricing models on NT and SQL Server so much it became unaffordable for small businesses. In 2 cuts, I watched the future of databases crumble.
- scruffyherder 3y ago
  How big was the database? that database 'engine' thing is free for DB's under 2GB back in the SQL 7 days.
ethanpil 3y ago
I remember reading during this era that Bill Gates' daily driver was a Dec Alpha workstation running NT... Don't remember the source.
treve 3y ago
Is it just me or has there been a resurgence of interest in the Windows 3 era of computing lately? Both actual machines and aesthetically I see things flash by a lot.
- M95D 3y ago
  I think it's a backlash against touch-UIs forced on on destop users: everything is flat, lots and lots of empty wasted screen space, huge buttons, no borders, no scroll bars, etc.
- nullindividual 3y ago
  Nostalgia from elder millennials such as myself fuel this fire. When computing was much more of an academic exercise than commercial. When new, always incompatible hardware and software was released. Higher variety of OSes and processor architectures, which is interesting to those of us who were too young to purchase equipment. Etc…
  - snerbles 3y ago
    There were so many cool exotic systems that I read about in books and magazines, but never had the resources or knew the right people to actually play with. Parents and school admins barely knew what that newfangled information superhighway was, and later on at best the stock response to "I want to learn C" was "we aren't paying $1,000 for Visual Studio" - GNU was a completely unknown concept until I stumbled across Slashdot some time in 2000. I imagine similar stories played out for many a mid-90s rural computer nerd. Second-hand nostalgia, if you will.
  - sillywalk 3y ago
    This. I saved up and bought a Sound Blaster Pro. I wanted an SGI machine that cost more than a car, not that I would have the slightest idea what to do after running the demos on it. That or one of those orange AS/400 boxes. Which I would have even less use for.
lizknope 3y ago
Does anyone remember the FX!32 binary translator? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FX!32 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FX!32 I remember Linux had some version of this as well as the ability to run OSF/1 binaries.
- mbushey 3y ago
  Sure do! I was a beta tester. Pippi (sp?) was my contact at DEC. It was cool that the more you ran an x86 exe, the faster it got.
  - lizknope 3y ago
    I found a post about the Linux version em86. I don't think it saved the results like FX!32 Someone on this forum was the guy who made the Linux version using the FX!32 as the basis. https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/software/general-linux-open-source/1270716-linux-5-14-drops-old-dec-alpha-specific-binary-loader-used-for-x86-binary-emulation/page2 https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/software/general-linux...

170 points by jandeboevrie 3y ago

We had one of those. Very quick though it ended up as a server for mp3 files for the office.

_ph_ 3y ago

I saw once one :) For a very short time, the German computer retail chain "Vobis" would sell Dec Alpha machines with Windows NT 3.1. Too bad that didn't expand later on. It would have been great for the computer market, if more competition to Intel had existed longer.

mega_dingus 3y ago

DEC's relationship with MS was fascinating DEC sued MS due to Cutler's contribution to NT. DEC thought they could sue themselves into MS's good graces. They had embroidered polo shirts saying "Strategic Relationship", and saw several employees wearing them, and the phrase was repeated often DEC couldn't figure out why Office performed worse on Alpha than x86. They sent an employee to MS, only to find MS had a single build server stashed under some desk. MS was compiling Office with -O0, obviously doing the absolute bare minimum to check a box and move on with their lives. Source: I'm a former DEC employee

hypercube33 3y ago
Fascinating. Dave over at Dave's Garage on YouTube talks about having a dec I believe -- if what you heard is true I wonder if it was the sole machine you're talking about. Maybe he can shed some light from the other side (Microsoft)
- maaarghk 3y ago
  IIRC - he mentioned that someone _else_ had a DEC machine, and actually used it as their dev box. The dev with the DEC box person developed the kernel panic code, aka the blue screen of death - and blue was chosen because that's the default screen colour when the DEC box is turned on. The idea was to reset the colour to the default before printing the kernel panic message. So while DEC NT is sort of a footnote, it did have this pretty profound influence : )
  - bitwize 3y ago
    Windows 3.x's fatal exception screens were also blue.
    - chungy 3y ago
      Indeed; I think Windows 2.0 even had it. The story might sound plausible until the holes are poked in the hypothesis.
    - ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
      So were the color schemes on many 8-bit computers of the '80s, such as Ataris and Commodores.
  - jvert 3y ago
    This is a bit of a game of telephone - NT Alpha shipped after NT 3.1 (i386 & Mips) and the port was done almost entirely by DEC. The blue screen preceded the Alpha and was really based on the color scheme from the firmware on the Mips workstation which Microsoft built internally. And, of course, the legendary SlickEdit, which was one of the original editors available on Win32. After NT 3.1, Microsoft assumed primary responsibility for NT Alpha, although there were also some great people at DECWest still involved. source: me, I'm the 'someone _else_' who owned all the Alpha stuff at Microsoft.
scruffyherder 3y ago
i'd probably blame the compiler. It's a weird mess of DEC objects being glued together to run on NT (Like the MIPS/PPC ones too). And if you wanted to make anything that for sure ran on all CPU type's you'd build /Od. Doing /O2 or /Ox was a recipe to run nowhere. The real shame is that 64bit beta compiler does such a substantially better job on the Alpha, but like everything else once everything started to gel, it suddenly imploded.
- mega_dingus 3y ago
  Compiler was definitely somewhat to blame. I was on the C/C++ team at the time, and C++ was definitely an afterthought on the existing C frontend, of a big 3-stage compiler I was on Digital UNIX so I didn't deal with VMS or Windows much. But Digital UNIX couldn't get out of their way with object file formats (COFF vs ELF and whatever else), on top of the compiler inefficiencies A recipe for disaster when the MS company employee doesn't want to do it in the first place, and you give them an artisan product that's hard to use properly
  - scruffyherder 3y ago
    damn so many potential questions, but I don't know if you can answer any as I know most people that were in those pivotal years are so cagey about it.
fredsmith219 3y ago
I was running OpenVMS on VAX machines in that era. I couldn’t figure out why DEC wanted NT, a single user operating system, for their mini computers. It made no sense to me. As an aside I had an OpenVMS gig as recently as 2020. It was fun to dust off my old DCL skills.
- icedchai 3y ago
  I have an Alpha here with OpenVMS! It's fun to play around with. VMS was the first multi-user system I had access to, way back when I was a teenager in the late 80's.
- tssva 3y ago
  > I couldn’t figure out why DEC wanted NT, a single user operating system, for their mini computers. When did you figure out that NT wasn't a single user operating system?
  - postmodest 3y ago
    NT's support for multiplexed interactive user sessions is piss-poor and has always come with a CAL restriction that was _absurd_. To this day there's no real "multiuser on consoles". (Yes yes, Citrix, rdp, Powershell Remoting, OpenSSH: compare those with X and, I guess, also SSH, and they suck.)
    - tssva 3y ago
      I'm not sure what the requirement for purchasing CALs has to do with whether an OS is multi-user or not. I have administered or been a user of interactive remote NT user session systems going back to beta testing the initial release of WinFrame in the mid 90's. Although worlds better today, I would not have called it pisspoor even then. Today RDS is much more capable than X on a unix system.
      - tiahura 3y ago
        As someone else in that space in the mid 90s I would agree that it was pretty remarkable nearly 30 years ago, especially considering the competition.
eej71 3y ago
Former VMS user here. The whole "affinity" program that DEC keep pushing just seemed confused and pointless. I think by the time DEC management realized that they had "played themselves" it was too late. And then the Itanium thing happened.
- panick21_ 3y ago
  > And then the Itanium thing happened. Its still funny to me how Itanium by its announcement basically killed or significantly delayed most other architectures only to turn out to be a dog.
  - hapless 3y ago
    Context is important. All of those competing architectures were becoming prohibitively expensive to enhance. Alpha never paid for itself, ever, the market share was too small. POWER and SPARC had multiple failed projects with enormous capital costs. MIPS hit a performance dead-end with such low market share SGI saw no way to rebuild. HPPA was bleeding HP dry. Itanium may have hastened their demise but all of these archs had the same core problems with investment returns. The writing was on the wall, and Intel was offering something people desperately wanted. (Unfortunately for everyone involved, it did not pan out.)
    - panick21_ 3y ago
      I that understand that context. But even so. POWER and SPARC were continue to be developed. And its hard to argue that either of them should have given up on their architecture. POWER is still developed. It probably made sense for Sun to stop working on SPARC eventually but not when Itanium was announced. Sun problem was just that they spend quite a bit of money, they were just never actually very good at designing processors. SGI was the most aggressive on telling everybody that Itanium would be the future. And they paid for that. They massively delayed MIPS upgrades (only to then start it again once they realized it would take a while for Itanium to come to the market). For a while after this they still made their money on MIPS and all their attempts to push Itanium pretty much fell flat. So arguable it was smart for them to plan to eventually dump MIPS but now how and when they tried to do it (Also I don't disagree that MIPS was a deadend). The deal HP got would have been fantastic if Intel had adopted PA-RISC 64-bit instead of Itanium. Given what happened HP wasn't really competitive with Sun 64-bit SMP servers and Sun made a killing on those things before the bubble. Once they bought Compaq and for a while were selling SMP servers based on Alpha. HP really should have continued to push Alpha after the bought Compaq. The already had VMS ported to Alpha and a large captured base willing to pay a little extra. They aggressively ported VMS to Itanium and thanks to the insane deal they made Intel had to manufacture them processors for a decade+. They are a large enough company and Alpha next few version had the chance to be really great, with things advanced vector extension and they had basically had the best processor team in the world. So yes, it was correct that all these companies wanted to drop their development cost, but doing so before you know really about Itanium and how good it was, that's questionable and messed up all the strategies. There was just an assumption that Itanium was gone be amazing. Granted, VLIW processors were all the hype. Sun also waste a bunch of money on VLIW processor technology in the 90s and unlike HP, they didn't it on Intel. Gordan Bell tried to hook up Alpha with Intel and make Alpha the 64-bit architecture that Intel went with. That would have been quite a different history. But for various reasons this didn't happen, and instead Intel went with HP and their next generation VLIW idea. P.S: It would have been pretty smart of Sun went in on Alpha in 1992, then they could have saved on development threw out the 90s. DEC had built up a huge fabs to handle Alpha but almost nobody bought it. They were really looking for a high value costumer and couldn't find one. Edit: > (Unfortunately for everyone involved, it did not pan out.) Well it wasn't unfortunate for everybody. Sun made quite a bit of money for a few more years with SPARC. And so did IBM with Power. I think those two companies were happy with the Itanium failure.
Damogran6 3y ago
The single best x86 computer I've ever used was a Dec Pentium 90...updated eventually to a Pentium II-300. Dec hardware was stupendous. Other systems were (obviously) faster and smaller and probably cooler and more power efficient, but their daughter card implimention of a CPU/RAM upgrade came from their obvious expertise in the Server/Scientific Workstation market with non x-86 architectures.
- rasz 3y ago
  and resulted in project failure. Grant Saviers was responsible for PC division in early nineties. Oral History of Grant Saviers, part 2 of 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Od830KDrLUU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Od830KDrLUU Oral History of Grant Saviers part 1: http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2012/08/102746014-05-01-acc.pdf http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/201... Oral History of Grant Saviers part 2: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2023/04/102795787-05-01-acc.pdf https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20... >As DEC’s Corporate Vice President of PC Systems and Peripherals from 1990 to 1992 Grant successfully restarted DEC’s PC business from a dormant state and grew revenues to $350M and break-even profitability in 18 months. @18 minute timestamp - they copied DELL strategy and did pretty good, business was growing and then DEC founder and CEO Ken Olsen decided to kill it. Grant got recruited to lead Adaptec.
  - Damogran6 3y ago
    Awww. Boss had a Digital HiNote that seemed like a pretty nifty laptop compared to the competition at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_HiNote#/media/File:DEC_HiNote_Ultra_CS450,_picture_2.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_HiNote#/media/File:DEC...
    - nxobject 3y ago
      What a pity... it seemed like "what should DEC doing in the 90s, and how is it related to DEC's historical identity?" was the question when looking back at their 90's strategy – and it seemed like thoughtfully engineered hardware, even if on a commodity architecture, is one of them. Even if it wasn't the full stack integration from semiconductor fabrication, to OS and networking, that they were used to.
panick21_ 3y ago
Yeah that relationship is strange. Seems to me they should have used that Cutler/MICA thing to make a huge amount of money and help their PC division. Not sure exactly what that 'Strategic Relationship' bought them. Seems to me all the companies making partnerships with Microsoft got shafted. Microsoft were always somehow able to use getting sued into making profitable deals for them in the long run. Because most companies didn't want to drive home the dagger, but rather get a few concessions on some kind of partnership.
sillywalk 3y ago
Not sure if this is true, but Microsoft(or Cutler) allegedly stole MICA source code and used it NT, which was part of that lawsuit. https://techmonitor.ai/technology/dec_forced_microsoft_into_alliance_with_legal_threat https://techmonitor.ai/technology/dec_forced_microsoft_into_...

spandextwins 3y ago

That’s great! I’ve got an old copy of visual studio and windows nt 3.1 in the closet, ran on mips, alpha, sparc and intel. Back when Microsoft was cross platform.

luma 3y ago
They still are, ARM is widely supported. There just aren’t many other platforms in wide use today to target.
Furball37 3y ago
I'm 100% sure you're misremembering it running on SPARC, NT never ran on SPARC.
- dagw 3y ago
  Correct. NT 3.1 ran on x86, Alpha and MIPS. NT 3.5 added PowerPC support. As you say, SPARC was never supported. Windows 2000 had both x86 and Alpha support up through the release candidate, but Alpha was dropped before final release. I actually had an Alpha workstation running Windows 2000 (for fun) back in the mists of time.
  - Furball37 3y ago
    There's also the Beta Whistler AXP64 Build which was used to port Windows over to 64-bit before there was any 64-bit hardware available that could run NT. The people in the virtuallyfun discord got that running (I am part of that! I have an AlphaServer 800 5/500 next to me, with some hacks to the setup and telling it what HAL DLL to load it installed perfectly!)
  - omnibrain 3y ago
    Later there was Windows XP 64-Bit Edition for Itanic Workstations and there was Windows Server up to 2008 R2 for Itanic Servers.
    - scruffyherder 3y ago

h2odragon 3y ago

I had a stack of surplus purchase alphas i used for all sorts of things. All but one of them we put SRM bios on when we got them; but that one was for some reason unable to take it and so was stuck with ARC and (as i recall) wouldn't boot linux. So I gave that one to my teenage nephew, who ran NT on it and became quite the Windows geek with a successful sysadmin career. "I ran NT on Alpha as a teen" is a pretty good resume enhancer, I guess.

garciasn 3y ago
I had one of the UDBs back in the late 90s and used it as a MP3 server/foot heater running RH 5.2 (I believe; it's been 25+ years). My wife made me recycle it when we were cleaning out our house before our first child. I should have kept it as a combo doorstop and space heater.

cbm-vic-20 3y ago

I worked at Digital on the Alpha/NT team at the time- the AXP 150 "Jensen" was my daily driver desktop- that machine, like most other DEC hardware, was incredibly well built.

scruffyherder 3y ago
Was the HAL really that compilcated? It was listed as one of the reasons why Compaq had bailed on NT. Also were you involved at all with the 64bit versions of NT? It's cool that checked build got out, and kind of funny how the compiler was hiding in plain sight for decades, but glad I spotted it.
marcellanz 3y ago
I enjoy to have such a machine as one of the few machines I kept over the years.

panick21_ 3y ago

The more I learn about history of computing, the more it seems like DEC canceling of Project PRISM (and Project MICA) is at the center of a lot of history. Project MICA would have yield a very modern OS that could have supported both Unix and VMS interfaces and it would be only natural to add whatever Windows would come up with in addition to that. That PRISM and MICA seem to be a real paths forward for everything from workstation to multicore servers. We later saw with Alpha what DEC was capable of and PRISM also did a lot of compiler work that was also used for the Alpha compiler later. But that was quite a bit later of course. First of all, Cutler and lots of others went to Microsoft and developed Windows NT. Without Cutler, this project would look very different. Bill Gates was seriously arguing for having no virtual memory on this OS! Absolutely crazy to think what would have happened. If DEC had expanded, rather then contracted its team there, it would have been quite a difference, with two major companies developing a next generation OS in the area. I think DEC was generally more popular for technical people then Microsoft. Then for DEC, their workstation strategy went to MIPS/Ultrix witch was moderately successful but that whole thing was then killed in favor of Alpha/OSF1. This created a lot of bad blood by the people that were stuck on MIPS/Ultrix. DEC was one of the few companies that really went all in on the whole OSF stuff. Just like Sun, it might have been smarter to stick with BSD base rather then System V SVR4 base (love to hear from somebody inside about this topic). Because PRISM didn't happen over the next couple years the VAX line suffered from pretty bad price to performance. Management also seem not committed to VMS as OSF and NT became big parts of their strategy. So this post about running Windows NT+Alpha is really kind of a result of this canceling of PRISM/MICA. I reading some books on DEC now but during some online browsing I found this interesting document from somebody at DEC from late 1994: https://www.dgregscott.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/demise.pdf https://www.dgregscott.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/demise... Gorden Bell's Post Script on 'DEC is Dead, Long Live DEC' was also a great read.

glhaynes 3y ago
>Bill Gates was seriously arguing for having no virtual memory on this OS! That’d surprise me. This was a time when one of the major limiting factors to NT adoption was it needing “a lot” of RAM. And he’d had plenty of experience with virtual memory, including his own company’s Xenix and OS/2.

webdoodle 3y ago

After trying and failing to get MS Access to function on a DEC Alpha server, I finally gave up and installed SQL Server. It was a massive performance increase for many reasons, most of which related to MS Access being trash, but the better memory management in SQL server was part of it as well. Sadly MS dropped support for Alpha, and changed the pricing models on NT and SQL Server so much it became unaffordable for small businesses. In 2 cuts, I watched the future of databases crumble.

scruffyherder 3y ago
How big was the database? that database 'engine' thing is free for DB's under 2GB back in the SQL 7 days.

ethanpil 3y ago

I remember reading during this era that Bill Gates' daily driver was a Dec Alpha workstation running NT... Don't remember the source.

treve 3y ago

Is it just me or has there been a resurgence of interest in the Windows 3 era of computing lately? Both actual machines and aesthetically I see things flash by a lot.

M95D 3y ago
I think it's a backlash against touch-UIs forced on on destop users: everything is flat, lots and lots of empty wasted screen space, huge buttons, no borders, no scroll bars, etc.
nullindividual 3y ago
Nostalgia from elder millennials such as myself fuel this fire. When computing was much more of an academic exercise than commercial. When new, always incompatible hardware and software was released. Higher variety of OSes and processor architectures, which is interesting to those of us who were too young to purchase equipment. Etc…
- snerbles 3y ago
  There were so many cool exotic systems that I read about in books and magazines, but never had the resources or knew the right people to actually play with. Parents and school admins barely knew what that newfangled information superhighway was, and later on at best the stock response to "I want to learn C" was "we aren't paying $1,000 for Visual Studio" - GNU was a completely unknown concept until I stumbled across Slashdot some time in 2000. I imagine similar stories played out for many a mid-90s rural computer nerd. Second-hand nostalgia, if you will.
- sillywalk 3y ago
  This. I saved up and bought a Sound Blaster Pro. I wanted an SGI machine that cost more than a car, not that I would have the slightest idea what to do after running the demos on it. That or one of those orange AS/400 boxes. Which I would have even less use for.

lizknope 3y ago

Does anyone remember the FX!32 binary translator? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FX!32 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FX!32 I remember Linux had some version of this as well as the ability to run OSF/1 binaries.

mbushey 3y ago
Sure do! I was a beta tester. Pippi (sp?) was my contact at DEC. It was cool that the more you ran an x86 exe, the faster it got.
- lizknope 3y ago
  I found a post about the Linux version em86. I don't think it saved the results like FX!32 Someone on this forum was the guy who made the Linux version using the FX!32 as the basis. https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/software/general-linux-open-source/1270716-linux-5-14-drops-old-dec-alpha-specific-binary-loader-used-for-x86-binary-emulation/page2 https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/software/general-linux...