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Comment by hawflakes | Hacker News Reader

DEC made fx!32 to allow x86 emulation on alpha only. They didn’t tackle ppc or mips.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FX!32

All 32 bit versions of NT had support for x86 DOS and Win16 programs, which on non-x86 systems was implemented with an emulator. FX!32 was for x86 Win32 apps, which was indeed a DEC specific thing, they seemed to be far more interested in pushing NT than IBM or SGI/MIPS, and clearly realised that they needed to run all this software being written for Windows 95 to be taken seriously as a Windows system.

Both DEC and HP were pushing for NT. (I interned at dec and worked briefly at HP while both were still pushing Alpha and PA)

HP foodnote: HP had this vision of NT at the desktop and HP/UX server iron. Folks preferred Solaris over HP/UX so that was their idea to adopt windows. The guy at hp pushing that agenda, Belluzo, eventually left and went to Microsoft.

DEC was one of the few vendors who built hardware designed to run multiple operating systems from day one. Alpha had VMS, OSF/1 (aka Tru64, aka Digital UNIX) and NT. VAX had VMS and Ultrix. The short MIPS era also had Ultrix. PDP-11 had RSTS/E, RSX-11, RT-11, and some early primitive OSes, and late in the game, Ultrix.

FX!32 was really cool. The Alpha systems were crazy fast compared to the Pentium systems of its time, so even using the translation layer, x86 Windows NT apps performed reasonably well under FX!32. The intent was to have that be a stop-gap until third-party software vendors made native Alpha builds of their NT apps.

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