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Comment by roywashere | Hacker News Reader

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 :-)

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The NT PE executable format supports quite a few processors families.

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.

And why? We can see that a number of those architectures eventually got a WindowsCE release.

Notably the Dreamcast ran WinCE on SH4 CPU.

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.

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).

That is controlled by this bit in the subsystem field. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/debug/pe-for...

Subsystems 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.

Wait, does that mean there's a risc-v version of windows?

If there is, it isn't public. .NET does apparently have RISC-V architecture support in some sense due to a pull request by a Samsung engineer.

https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/82382

From a technical standpoint, there's no reason Windows couldn't be brought to RISC-V in some form or fashion. It's designed for that portability.

It was almost certainly added in order to support EFI which uses PE/COFF format binaries.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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/

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.

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-o...

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