8 ms·

There was also Windows NT for Alpha and RISC, neither were popular. And now we have yet again Windows for ARM. Everything old is new again :-)

jasongill 2y ago
Windows NT for Alpha was quite popular, second only to Windows NT for x86
- mc32 2y ago
  500Mzh vs 233Mhz, if you could afford the cooling. Maybe exaggerating the gap, but I think it was pretty big which contributed to the enthusiasm for DEC alpha.
  - zdw 2y ago
    That or more was the gap. Also, "cooling" is relative - the highest power draw of a 21164 Alpha is around 40-60w, which is normal to low these days, but was huge back then.
- asveikau 2y ago
  People forget the excitement around alpha from the mid 90s. It was the first Linux port to non-x86 for example. It was a little bit before the AMD vs Intel wars and race to 1ghz kicked off, so it represented a challenge to Intel's monopoly.
  - trentnelson 2y ago
    I remember my first job in 2000, straight out of 1.5 years of college, getting to play directly with Digital UNIX and Alpha processors! The Alpha 21264 was a beast at the time.
  - wcfields 2y ago
    IIRC: There was a bonanza of DEC Multia Alpha's[1] that made it's way to some salvage seller in the late 90's for like $100-ish. The catch was they didn't include RAM and it had to be True Parity RAM which was fairly expensive. [1] http://www.obsolyte.com/dec/multia/ http://www.obsolyte.com/dec/multia/
- themadturk 2y ago
  I remember a law firm I worked at buying an Alpha server running NT to host a SQL Server database system in the mid-90s. I was network admin, but we ran Netware at the time an I didn't touch that machine, we had an Alpha sysadmin/dba for it. I left a few months later to a firm that was already running NT on its servers; learning a new network OS in a stable environment was much preferable to converting from Netware to NT.
sumtechguy 2y ago
The NT PE executable format supports quite a few processors families. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/debug/pe-format#machine-types https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/debug/pe-for... I just like the valid MSDOS stub header executable on the front of every DLL and executable.
- RajT88 2y ago
  And why? We can see that a number of those architectures eventually got a WindowsCE release. Notably the Dreamcast ran WinCE on SH4 CPU.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - dfox 2y ago
    Mostly because that format is not strictly speaking Windows-specific but comes from Unix System V release 4. Also various oddball embedded platforms use the full NT-style PE COFF as their native object/image format (but these usually either specify i386 as machine type or place some invalid value there).
  - asveikau 2y ago
    Internally, NT first targeted Intel i860, not x86. This was a deliberate decision to break old assumptions. It was designed to be multiplatform from the beginning. The fact that it had an NT syscall layer but also a Win32 one, then formerly an OS/2 subsystem, also reflected this heritage of adaptability, multi-platform, portability etc.
  - sumtechguy 2y ago
    That is controlled by this bit in the subsystem field. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/debug/pe-format#optional-header-windows-specific-fields-image-only https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/debug/pe-for... Subsystems https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/debug/pe-format#windows-subsystem https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/debug/pe-for... There are also a few others usually NE for older win16 and LE for OS2 and other interesting win16 overlay types.
hawflakes 2y ago
Iirc MIPS was on the installation CD and possibly what the team used. There was also a pa-risc port that never shipped… https://www.osnews.com/story/139479/windows-nt-and-netware-on-pa-risc-and-a-hp-ux-port-to-x86/ https://www.osnews.com/story/139479/windows-nt-and-netware-o...

jasongill 2y ago

Windows NT for Alpha was quite popular, second only to Windows NT for x86

mc32 2y ago
500Mzh vs 233Mhz, if you could afford the cooling. Maybe exaggerating the gap, but I think it was pretty big which contributed to the enthusiasm for DEC alpha.
- zdw 2y ago
  That or more was the gap. Also, "cooling" is relative - the highest power draw of a 21164 Alpha is around 40-60w, which is normal to low these days, but was huge back then.
asveikau 2y ago
People forget the excitement around alpha from the mid 90s. It was the first Linux port to non-x86 for example. It was a little bit before the AMD vs Intel wars and race to 1ghz kicked off, so it represented a challenge to Intel's monopoly.
- trentnelson 2y ago
  I remember my first job in 2000, straight out of 1.5 years of college, getting to play directly with Digital UNIX and Alpha processors! The Alpha 21264 was a beast at the time.
- wcfields 2y ago
  IIRC: There was a bonanza of DEC Multia Alpha's[1] that made it's way to some salvage seller in the late 90's for like $100-ish. The catch was they didn't include RAM and it had to be True Parity RAM which was fairly expensive. [1] http://www.obsolyte.com/dec/multia/ http://www.obsolyte.com/dec/multia/
themadturk 2y ago
I remember a law firm I worked at buying an Alpha server running NT to host a SQL Server database system in the mid-90s. I was network admin, but we ran Netware at the time an I didn't touch that machine, we had an Alpha sysadmin/dba for it. I left a few months later to a firm that was already running NT on its servers; learning a new network OS in a stable environment was much preferable to converting from Netware to NT.

sumtechguy 2y ago

The NT PE executable format supports quite a few processors families. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/debug/pe-format#machine-types https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/debug/pe-for... I just like the valid MSDOS stub header executable on the front of every DLL and executable.

RajT88 2y ago
And why? We can see that a number of those architectures eventually got a WindowsCE release. Notably the Dreamcast ran WinCE on SH4 CPU.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- dfox 2y ago
  Mostly because that format is not strictly speaking Windows-specific but comes from Unix System V release 4. Also various oddball embedded platforms use the full NT-style PE COFF as their native object/image format (but these usually either specify i386 as machine type or place some invalid value there).
- asveikau 2y ago
  Internally, NT first targeted Intel i860, not x86. This was a deliberate decision to break old assumptions. It was designed to be multiplatform from the beginning. The fact that it had an NT syscall layer but also a Win32 one, then formerly an OS/2 subsystem, also reflected this heritage of adaptability, multi-platform, portability etc.
- sumtechguy 2y ago
  That is controlled by this bit in the subsystem field. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/debug/pe-format#optional-header-windows-specific-fields-image-only https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/debug/pe-for... Subsystems https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/debug/pe-format#windows-subsystem https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/debug/pe-for... There are also a few others usually NE for older win16 and LE for OS2 and other interesting win16 overlay types.

hawflakes 2y ago

Iirc MIPS was on the installation CD and possibly what the team used. There was also a pa-risc port that never shipped… https://www.osnews.com/story/139479/windows-nt-and-netware-on-pa-risc-and-a-hp-ux-port-to-x86/ https://www.osnews.com/story/139479/windows-nt-and-netware-o...