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Comment by toast0 | Hacker News Reader

> The "PowerPC Edition" did not sell much

NT4 included all the supported architectures on the cd-rom. You didn't buy an x86 version or a PPC version or a MIPS version or an Alpha version... You just bought NT4 client or server and it was all there. Microsoft may have had analytics of use on ppc, but not specifically sales. OEM sales, sure.

More likely, no PPC oems were interested in selling NT5 (Windows 2000) bundled with their hardware, and so Microsoft gave up on that. Alpha was supported into the release candidates (and I've seen comments that builds continued but were no longer distributed outside Microsoft), but Alpha imploded during the release time frame.

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Worse than that: other than Apple and the clones, there were hardly any PPC OEMs at all, and Old World Power Mac hardware wasn't PReP (which is why it couldn't run it). Largely only IBM's hardware could, like the rare as hen's teeth Power Series ThinkPads, or the unobtainium Power Series workstations, and some of Motorola's equally rare stuff. Those landed with a thud in the market and were extremely expensive, and it made sense for Microsoft to jettison it.

Apple was going to get NT on at least the Apple Network Server (Ellen Hancock once claimed there would be upgrade ROMs that could boot it), but that never happened.

Alpha, at least, had vendors, and existed in some numbers. My AlphaPC 164LX [0] was made by Samsung.

[0] http://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2023/03/refurb-weekend-dec-alphap...

FWIW I had one of those IBM Power Series workstations, and Windows NT was installable via CD-ROM.

Considering I had no idea how to use AIX then it was nice to have a machine with a Sound Recorder application (probably to hook up to a cd player and play to a tape recorder), the ability to play canyon.mid, run MS Paint, and change the cursor to an animated horse. That's what workstations are for right?

After Compaq decided they wouldn't support Windows on Alpha, Microsoft continued using the hardware for developing 64-bit Windows (the previous Alpha releases were all 32-bit) until Itanium hardware became available. Here's a blogpost where someone goes over an Alpha 64-bit version of Windows 2000: https://virtuallyfun.com/2023/05/15/windows-2000-64-bit-for-...

2210 isn't a Windows 2000 build even, but a Windows XP prerelease

yeah, but 64bit versions are called "Windows 2000" in the moment. see https://msfn.org/board/topic/183599-windows-2000-x64/ for screenshots.

> After Compaq decided they wouldn't support Windows on Alpha, Microsoft continued using the hardware for developing 64-bit Windows

I seem to recall hearing that Linux also developed its 64-bit support on Alpha.

A (dual?) Alpha workstation was Linus’ daily driver for a while, IIRC.

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