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Comment by baron3dl | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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.

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.

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.

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