5 ms·
Run Windows 2000 on a DEC Alpha with a new es40 fork
- allenrb 3mo agoEmulating Alpha on x86_64 is definitely not a thing the Alpha designers foresaw. :-)
- baron3dl 3mo agodid anyone ever run W2k on an ES40 in production? the only dec hardware I ever touched that ran windows was an AlphaServer 1000, and my assignment was to get it back to running VMS. though, I'll admit now, i goldbricked a bit and spent some time trying out Digital UNIX first.
- icedchai 3mo agoI never saw Win 2K on Alpha... I worked at a mostly DEC shop for a while. They had transitioned their main product from VAX to Alpha. Most of the systems ran Digital Unix and VMS, but there was an AlphaServer with NT 4.
- nyrikki 3mo agoI had to run NT4 on a 4100 in prod at my very first Internet startup job. We also had a bunch of 1000 and 1000a's, and an AlphaStation running AltaVista firewall all on NT. An ALR 6x6 (6* Pentium Pros) was faster for Windows than the fully loaded out AS4100 IIRC. Except that the 4100 supported more memory and PCI slots IIRC.
- ForOldHack 3mo agoMy friend Eric, had an unused Alpha server 4100 under his desk...It was used for testing more than a year ago, ( in the early 2000s ). He asked for the install disks, and got a entire box of everything it came with VMS/Ultrix/NT 3.5.. We tried to use raid, but none of the drivers worked. So what... we loaded NT, then Digital UNIX, and finally VMS, but we knew nothing about VMS, so one disk for NT, and one for Digital UNIX. The floating point was outstanding. just wish there was more software for it.
- monocasa 3mo agoMicrosoft never shipped Alpha support for win2k in the release builds, but only the betas and release candidates, so I doubt anyone ran it in "production".
- baron3dl 3mo agooh, fair. i'd extend the question to include release builds of NT. where i operated alphas, NT ran on commodity x86 hardware, where VMS could not.
- p_l 3mo agoCompaq dropped the bombshell about canceling Alpha just before Win2k RTM, surprising both Microsoft team involved and Compaq-side team. Microsoft continued to use 2000 on Alpha to work out bugs in 64bit support since it was the only 64bit platform they had supported that had operational hardware (support for PPC was only for 32bit), making it important bit in support of Itanium and soon later amd64 ports. Some of the details made for Alpha support (including extended support for software like FX!32) are now backbone of x86-on-ARM support in windows ARM builds
- sillywalk 3mo agoAs a side-note, it's interesting that all of the released versions of NT on Alpha were 32 bit. Raymond Chen has a blog post[0] about using Alpha to develop 64bit Windows before Itanium hardware was available. Virtually Fun has some more excellent background on finding a compiler for 64bit Windows[1], finding a copy of Windows 2000 64bit for Alpha AXP[2], and a detailed article about making an ISO from the found copy. [0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/technet-magazine/cc718978(v=msdn.10) https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/technet-... [1] https://virtuallyfun.com/2023/05/05/hiding-in-plain-sight-the-64bit-dec-alpha-c-compiler/ https://virtuallyfun.com/2023/05/05/hiding-in-plain-sight-th... [2] https://virtuallyfun.com/2023/05/15/windows-2000-64-bit-for-alpha-axp/ https://virtuallyfun.com/2023/05/15/windows-2000-64-bit-for-... [3] https://virtuallyfun.com/2023/06/26/axp64-2210-installation-media-reconstruction/ https://virtuallyfun.com/2023/06/26/axp64-2210-installation-...
- _blk 3mo agoOK, I imagine that involved quite some challenges. Well done. But why? I fail to see a purpose. Is it just a DOOM runs on my smart toaster kind of thing or something that has production value?
- jaffa2 3mo agonever ask why, but instead, why not?
- andrewjf 3mo agoThis is pretty cool, it brings back memories. Thanks for posting. I used to manage Tru64 (Alpha) and OpenVMS (VAX and Alpha). Mostly Oracle DB and whatever they called their App development suite (horrible, horrible software) for a University's ERP system (called Banner) and infrastructure (Multinet on OpenVMS/VAX for DNS, DHCP, mail, etc). After that I moved on to AIX on Power5 for Oracle on HACMP and Veritas Cluster. Such a different world from what we have now. I have an old AlphaServer ES47 running OpenVMS and Power5 560Q running AIX in my garage
- baron3dl 3mo agoWhen I last got the VMS nostalgia bite, I picked up a DS10, on account of the power and space advantages over the ES line, not having a garage and all. I forget that what I miss was not the system, but the community on the system. Solo VMS is a lonely experience.
- xenophonf 3mo ago> I forget that what I miss was not the system, but the community on the system. Same. I had VMS running on an AS200 next to a beautiful X terminal, just like the computer lab at school. But my dad wasn't sitting next to me, hunting and pecking away at his old C.Itoh terminal. None of the usual suspects were across the table, locked into their favorite MUDD. And so on. I miss them all so much.
- mikewarot 3mo agoWhenever the nostalgia kicks in hard, I fire up OpenVMS 7.2 on the virtual 11/780 in my cheap Motorola phone, then SSH in. I love OpenSimH and Termux.
- baron3dl 3mo agoCluster that sucker. I got a pair of MicroVAX 3900s in a VMScluster, actually using the same disk image, just like they'd use the same physical disk in the old days. ALLOCLASS, bb. Somewhere, the OpenSimH docs say it'll corrupt the image, so ymmv.
- bartvk 3mo agoSomehow, Windows 2000 does not look dated to me. It looks functional and usable, and maybe even somewhat fresh. I never actually used it long-term (during college, started using Linux), so it can't be nostalgic. Anyone else feel the same?
- hsbauauvhabzb 3mo agoThe only thing better is server 2003.
- RamRodification 3mo agoHaving had consulting jobs working with Windows servers around 2015, this was ruined for me. Sooo many ancient out of support 2003 severs. Seeing it actually triggers some light anxiety ("oh no not another one!")
- GeekyBear 3mo agoDave Cutler created and ran the Windows NT product line through Windows 2000. Other people ran Windows XP, but Cutler was still in charge of Server 2003 before moving on to special projects like creating 64 bit Windows and Microsoft Azure. His attitude towards the eradication of known bugs really led to Windows feeling rock solid, with the exception of driver bugs (being the leading cause of blue screens).
- cube00 3mo agoThe dog fooding of building NT on daily builds of that same kernel was an impressive commitment to quality. Yes, it slows down velocity and we can't certainly have that (/s) but it's a nice glimpse into what engineering that prioritises quality could look like.
- happycube 3mo ago64-bit Windows was being worked on for 2003. x64 XP was in fact a build of 2003, and beta-wise, guess what Windows 2210 referenced in the readme is... ;) (haven't tried it yet)
- hsbauauvhabzb 3mo agoFrom Google, DEC Alpha is a RISC architecture, but I can’t see what es40 is, unless it’s just a fork code name?
- classichasclass 3mo agoes40 is an emulator that emulates an AlphaServer ES40 series system.
- justsomehnguy 3mo agohttps://manx-docs.org/collections/antonio/dec/Compaq_AlphaServer_ES40_Systems_Technical_Summary.pdf https://manx-docs.org/collections/antonio/dec/Compaq_AlphaSe...
- mrandish 3mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaServer#Tsunami_family https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaServer#Tsunami_family
- orra 3mo agoThis is really cool! There have been many DEC Alpha emulators over the years, but none have been capable of running Windows NT.
- crmd 3mo agoThis put a smile on my face. I have a random, vivid memory from college of being in a university IT cave trying and failing to install Windows 2000 RC3 on a DEC Alphastation 600. My friends and I were scratching our heads when somebody figured out that RC2 (the build referenced in this blog post) was the last Windows build to support Alpha. If I remember correctly we installed Red Hat Linux ~5-6.0 on the DEC and used it for various shenanigans. In retrospect it would have been fun to get Tru64 running on it instead…
- imoverclocked 3mo agoAFAICR, Linux was far easier to run stuff on by that point. Playing with different variants of Unix was certainly fun though! I remember being blown away by an Irix+OpenGL demo on “deprecated hardware” that a friend had access to in the late 90s. After growing up with a Borland compiler in dos and programming graphics in the most naive of manners possible, seeing accelerated graphics that outmoded any xscreensaver on my fancy 200Mhz Pentium Linux box opened my eyes a little more!
- toast0 3mo ago> failing to install Windows 2000 RC3 on a DEC Alphastation 600. My friends and I were scratching our heads when somebody figured out that RC2 (the build referenced in this blog post) was the last Windows build to support Alpha. If you had seen the RC2 disks, it would have been obvious. RC2 had different disks for Intel and Alpha, RC3 only had Intel disk(s). NT4 had all archs on the same disk, so it would have made some sense to be confused.
- mrandish 3mo agoI've heard the new JIT in this emulator can now exceed the speed of a 1.25GHz EV68CB processor ES45 for single core/thread.
- aghuang 3mo agoNever knew this. Thought the emulator would always slower.
- jeberle 3mo agoI love how egregiously bad CDE looks compared to Windows. Whoever made that call, dios mio.
- consumer451 3mo agoWhen I was a kid I visited a friend of the family at his workplace, who had a DEC Alpha on his desk. It was the first time I saw video playing in a window. It blew my little brain. IIRC, you could also resize the window while the video kept playing with no dropped frames. As a 486SX kid, the DEC Alpha felt like something from the far future to me. What would have been along those lines back then? An SGI workstation?
- sillywalk 3mo agoAs a lucky kid, I remember watching in awe, a postage stamp size video from a CD-ROM encyclopedia on my 486SX. Around the same time I got to see some Sun SPARCstations with an insane 32MB of RAM!
- jasoneckert 3mo agoI ran Windows 2000 Beta for years on my DEC Alphastations (4 Miatas and 4 Digital Ultimate Workstations). It ran flawlessly, and so did Office 97 for Alpha. CD-ROMs for both Windows 2000 Beta and Office 97 (for Alpha systems) came in our monthly TechNet subscription packages.
- ivolimmen 3mo agoBoth screenshots of Windows 2000 and OpenVMS are in my opinion the peak UI's.
- qubex 3mo agoThis is personally mildly disturbing because I remember beta-testing Windows 2000 on DEC Alpha back in late 1999, and eventually running Windows 2000 and BeOS on a dual PIII-450 machine (with 256 MB of RAM, SCSI HDs, and eventually an ATI Rage Fury graphics card… amazing back then and archaic nowadays).