Run Windows 2000 on a DEC Alpha with a new es40 fork | Hacker News Reader

Run Windows 2000 on a DEC Alpha with a new es40 fork

raymii.org

132 pointsjandeboevrie81 comments

Somehow, 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?

The only thing better is server 2003.

Having 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!")

Dave 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).

The 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.

64-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)

I ran 2003 on my laptop for ages. Only tricky part was installing the audio stack.

It really wasn't a bad operating system. In fact it kind of blew its (lame) Win9X predecessors out of the water! I ran on Win2000 for years before finally switching to Linux. Of course Microsoft ended up going a different course with its newer "offerings" and I have nothing but pity for those who still have to use their products on a day-to-day basis.

> It really wasn't a bad operating system

It was a wonderful operating system. It provided consumer desktop essentials (Plug & Play, DirectX 7, ACPI power management, Windows Driver Model (WDM), and support for consumer I/O interfaces like USB and Firewire) alongside a modernized UI, all running atop the NT kernel. I was extremely lucky to receive a free copy of Windows 2000 Pro as a student, because I rode that horse for years.

Then Microsoft added a green start button and dark blue backgrounds and packaged Win2k for home users as Windows XP.

the drawback for me was the startup time. it really seemed to hang out on the splash screen for quite a while (just as NT4 did, and ofc they were from the same core)

Windows 2000 was the first release of NT5. That's what made it 2000.

Windows ME on the other hand...

IIRC, Win2000 would wait for most/all services to complete startup before showing the login UI. XP would allow login as soon as enough of the system was started to support it. The tradeoff is that you might have slow performance from HDD thrashing while everything else finishes starting up.

It's been 20+ years so it's possible I had it wrong then, or remember it wrong now.

No, that's pretty accurate as I recall. Windows 2000 took a bit, but when it was up, it was up. Windows XP would pop you into what appeared to be a functional desktop quickly, but it was still loading in the background, and some things just sort of sat there for awhile. Win2K was much more predictable. When I wasn't on a Mac during my consultant days, it was on Windows 2000, because it was much more stable than the 98 clients.

> The tradeoff is that you might have slow performance from HDD thrashing while everything else finishes starting up.

You would often get audio buffer underuns on the startup sound, if enabled, especially if you had auto login.

XP started drivers and services in parallel. 2000 started them serially. That was the difference in startup speed.

I no longer remember when we could configure services as delay loading, most likely around XP timeframe.

> Then Microsoft added a green start button and dark blue backgrounds and packaged Win2k for home users as Windows XP.

XP contained a lot more than just theme changes. XP solved a lot of compatibility issues that Win2k still had at the time. Running 2000 applications on XP would be nearly guaranteed to work, but Microsoft needed to also get Windows Me/98/95 games and applications to run for consumers.

XP brought a few general improvements such as ClearType and the ability to revert driver updates (which Windows users are still unable to find these days, leading to the "I have to uninstall updates every week or my weird USB keyboard breaks" rants online).

Everything Windows 2000 did good, XP did as good or better. The biggest difference was the UI, but the "classic" theme stuck around until at least Windows 7.

Wasn’t also the graphics driver moved to kernel space in XP? A good performance boost at the cost of unrecoverable crashes if the driver failed.

That was moved in NT 4 actually.

Windows 2000 had a compat mode too and it was to run w9x stuff better than XP itself.

Win9X wasn't Win2k's ancestor. Win2k was from the house of Windows NT. WinXP was the merger of the two lines.

Probably very few people switched from Windows 98 to Windows 2000. That wasn't considered an upgrade path. That was installing a different operating system.

Technically Windows ME existed, I guess.

I got curious and I had a windows xp ISO lying around, apparently it does support migrating from win98 onwards which surprised me a bit, win95 has to do a fresh install. From looking at the various .inf files it seems to pull a lot more information from a NT based starting point than 9x. I'm not sure if I'm curious enough to try a 98 to NT5 upgrade in a VM though.

Whether or not many people would want to do that upgrade/migration is another question, but similar to you I doubt the number was high.

> very few people switched from Windows 98 to Windows 2000

I was one of them. I went from ME to 2k and it was definitely a big step up.

Me too. Went from 98SE on a P133 to 2000 on an Athlon XP 1600 in 2001, will never have an upgrade like that again...

I did, but I was already trying to use Windows NT at home as well. At work Windows 2000 was quite common, however I actually used the server SKU as workstation OS.

As I used to be big into UNIX in the early 2000's, I used to dual boot between it and Red-Hat, eventually I got fed up dual booting all the time depending on the project work, or client support, and ended up using Windows, alongside Humming Bird X Server to connect to our development servers (yep back when we were still time-sharing UNIX servers for coding tasks).

Yeah I used it as well, in fact I kept using it pretty much forever because I had a comfortable VMWare image with all my apps installed and wiping out your Windows system back to a known-good checkpoint is the only reasonable way to use Windows. Unfortunately this retro scheme fell apart after they stopped developing Intel Macs.

I'm pretty sure you could upgrade from Win2k as you could with Win XP.

I personally think the hypervisor architecture of 9x and its predecessors (starting at Windows/386) was far more interesting and innovative; while Win2k and the NT line are "traditional" OSes, 9x and 3.x are effectively VM hypervisors that have default hardware pass-through. DOS applications had dismal performance on NT, if they even ran at all.

The pre-NT Windows architecture was interesting for its "hack value" (remember that expression?), but as a user, even a technically minded one, reliability and absence of arbitrary limitations was more important.

DOS-based Windows had two main things going for it at the time, for users: It could run on average computers, and as you mentioned it could run most DOS software - most worked from Windows and all by simply stopping at DOS in the boot process (I almost always did the latter, I had no excess performance to give away).

Your comment reminds me (no insult intended) of the old adage that every doctor has a favourite disease.

Windows 9x and Me weren’t really the predecessors of Windows 2000; it’s real predecessor was Windows ant 4.0. They are very different lineages, with the former descending from 16 bit MS-DOS and Windows until version 3.11 and arguably being rooted in a copy of 1970s’ CP/M whereas the NT lineage was a clean implementation of a modern OS by David Cutler of VMS fame.

I ran W2K through most of high school and until like 2009 when Valve finally dropped support for it. It was a great OS fast, rarely crashed, most games would actually run on it. Valve dropping W2K support meant TF2 no longer ran without jumping through a bunch of hoops

You can fix Windows7/8/10/11 with Retrobar

There are a few APIs from Windows 7 that are great improvements over Win32, such as DirectWrite and Direct2D.

I daily drove it in the 2000s, and loved it. Later I used it for my server VMs due to the small memory footprint and fast remote response. If it supported current applications, I’d still be using it

I had windows 2000 on a laptop in the 2008 2010 era. It was already old at the time, but I actually preferred it to XP and certainly vista. You get NT which is nice compared to dos based 95/98/me but you get those tried and true aesthetics, which work well. I’m not sure I’d go back to it now, but it definitely sticks out as the high point of windows in that time period.

If you ran XP and Windows 98SE you got a close interface, even more with classic mode in XP, which was almost the same.

Ton's of people ran w2k as a 'better desktop windows'. I did, and pretty much all the developers I knew back then did.

Windows 2000 really was the best desktop OS from release until 2002 at least.

Linux was incomplete, Sun and SGI were dead except for servers, classic Mac OS was a crashy dinosaur, and Mac OS X was a slow mess. I bought 10.0 on release day and installed it on a dual core G4, almost the top Mac you could buy. It was not usable, much as I wanted to. (The real v1 was Mac OS X 10.2.)

Windows 2000 was designed for real professional apps because late ‘90s Microsoft had a serious appetite for taking over the workstation market. Microsoft acquired companies like Softimage, the leading 3D CGI app, and rebuilt their previously Unix-based products on Windows. This pro usability focus reflected back into the OS itself.

This didn’t last because Microsoft unified the Windows 95/98 consumer lineage into NT/2000, so starting with XP there wasn’t a pro Windows anymore. They had decisively won the workstation market and saw no need to invest anything more (just as happened with browsers). So 2000 remains the last time a major tech company built a pure pro desktop OS. Mac was always a consumer/pro hybrid, and ultimately Apple did it better than Microsoft.

I seem to recall more or less exactly when OS X became legendary. Must be around Jaguar or Panther. But coming from a Linux (and Unix) background, this was a godsend at the time. Now, quarter of a century later - still running it and it's brilliant. The only thing that bugs me is notarization.

I still have my snow leopard usb installer. That was a great OS. It made me switch to daily driving a Mac completely

I used to run Windows 2000 in production and it never gave me even a bit of grief.

That said, it was mostly just an internet gateway/dhcp server. But gave me less issues than the Win 98 clients.

Same. Also NT 4.0, even better. There is quite a bit of DNA sharing with DEC.

This 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

When 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.

> 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.

Whenever 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.

Cluster 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.

I also have an ES47 (running Linux)! Would you send me an email to my username at gmail? I've been working on a remote management tool for the ES47 that allows controlling the fan speeds that you might be interested in.

This 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…

AFAICR, 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!

> 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.

Emulating Alpha on x86_64 is definitely not a thing the Alpha designers foresaw. :-)

But does it have FX!32 working to run important x86 software in there?

The Turduckin endures.

More importantly, does the Symbolics Lisp Genera VM run? :-)

When 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?

As 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!

This 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).

I've heard the new JIT in this emulator can now exceed the speed of a 1.25GHz EV68CB processor ES45 for single core/thread.

Never knew this. Thought the emulator would always slower.

I 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.

I love how egregiously bad CDE looks compared to Windows. Whoever made that call, dios mio.

Both screenshots of Windows 2000 and OpenVMS are in my opinion the peak UI's.

This is really cool! There have been many DEC Alpha emulators over the years, but none have been capable of running Windows NT.

From Google, DEC Alpha is a RISC architecture, but I can’t see what es40 is, unless it’s just a fork code name?

es40 is an emulator that emulates an AlphaServer ES40 series system.

https://manx-docs.org/collections/antonio/dec/Compaq_AlphaSe...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaServer#Tsunami_family

did 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.

I 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.

I 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.

My 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.

Microsoft 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".

oh, 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.

Compaq 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

As 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-...

[1] https://virtuallyfun.com/2023/05/05/hiding-in-plain-sight-th...

[2] https://virtuallyfun.com/2023/05/15/windows-2000-64-bit-for-...

[3] https://virtuallyfun.com/2023/06/26/axp64-2210-installation-...

Yes, the released, as well as final RC for 2000, were still 32bit mode.

There's a quote, possibly from Raymond Chen, about how they originally naively thought they will be able to just change size of an int, IIRC, and that backfired seriously.

That said, 64bit release of windows was supposed to happen on Alpha had Compaq not pulled the plug

After Compaq bought Tandem, they said they were going to port NonStop from MIPS to the Alpha[0], but then cancelled that for Itanium[1]. I'm not sure if NonStop was ported/expanded from 32bit to 64bit when it was running on MIPS.

[0] https://www.scmp.com/article/256948/compaq-port-himalaya-alp...

[1] https://www.informationweek.com/it-leadership/compaq-to-aban...

OK, 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?

never ask why, but instead, why not?

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