Let’s take a step back from Windows 11 and go back in time – to 22 years ago, to be exact.
Alpha on Windows NT is dead. As far as NT goes, it’s an Intel world.
Last week, Compaq announced that it was laying off more than 100 of its Alpha/NT employees in its DECwest facility located near the Microsoft campus. This group of developers was tasked with making Alpha on NT a technical reality. Citing Compaq’s decision and the strength of Intel’s architecture and systems, Microsoft says it will discontinue development of future 32-bit and 64-bit Alpha products across its existing product line.
Windows NT on PowerPC, Alpha, MIPS, and Itanium have always been deeply fascinating to me, and at some point, I want to get my hands on some supported hardware, just for the fun of it.
There really isn’t any point to it. You’d have the same experience as Windows NT on x86, but with even less applications. Also you probably would not try to code directly in Assembly, so you wouldn’t even get that difference. It’s more of a box ticking exercise than actually fun.
This is coming from someone who is very much into old and unconventional computing.
Thanks for remembering us these good memories, there even was a RC version of Windows 2K available for Alpha, i remeber playing with this version “many years ago”.
Just like i played with th Sparc version of Nextep on a old SparcStation 5., which happened to be really faster than the original Nextstation based on Motorola CPU.
Guess what.. 🙂 I dissassembled the Sund SS5 to paint the case in black before reassembling it, using Dell LCD Monitor. Black also of course 🙂
Call me a geek 😛
MIPS/PPC are pretty much entirely useless, there was very little software for them aside from the base install and NT4 dropped them after the first or second service pack.
Alpha is a bit more useful, there were actually quite a few things that got ported to alpha over the years, and you have FX!32 for those things that weren’t. These platforms also tended to be more stable than x86, higher quality hardware and limited combinations. You don’t end up with the instability caused by flakey hardware and/or dodgy drivers.
The first 64bit versions of windows were actually for alpha, but they were for internal development and never released publicly. The available alpha versions actually run in a 32bit backwards compatibility mode, despite being a 64bit cpu. The same is true of mips, nt4 could run on some 64bit mips hardware but ran in 32bit mode.
Microsoft largely dumping cross platform support did have ramifications insofar as cross platform support kept them sane on coding for portability. A decline in internal development standards led to some snafu’s later.
I have a small fascination for Windows (or equivalent) running on architectures which aren’t your usual default. There is partly the thrill of doing it because you can but also the alienness of it. The funy thing though is it can be a big let down because if they did they job right you shouldn’t notice much if any difference. I’ve been pleased with myself in the past for doing something on a platform most people don’t expect. Years ago I was enjoying a visit to a local park and browsed a forum I used to regularly visit on a Nokia feature phone via Google which used to have a web to mobile web interface. Some months later the forum administrator posted a list of oddball computer which had connected and my phone showed up in the list.
The codebase for Vista and 7 was a bit of a fustercluck as far as i’m aware, but Windows NT before (and after) has been pretty well portable. XP ran on Itanium, Windows 8 ran on ARM, so for most of Windows history, there has been some form of non-x86 port available.
Why do people assume something being portable somehow addresses the “clusterfuck” of any code base. If anything portability increases the entropy in many cases.
At least when you run Linux or BSD on old hardware you have a fair amount of applications you can compile if there aren’t already packages for them. Running Windows on ARM would also give you a broader range of software to use since at least there’s everything in the Microsoft Store. My feelings about NT 4 on alternate hardware are the same today as they were back when it was shiny & new:
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Thom, I thing it’s like running NextStep on 68K hardware or running BeOS on PowerPC (or even as all these days..). You need to really want to be some kind of martyr to justify the pain of getting reliable hardware. And when you get there, MacOS X or Haiku (in my example) is way less pain and gives you much the same feeling on modern hardware. And I use OpenStep a LOT (even had the version for NT back in the day) and owned a BeBox and still have compatible Macs to run BeOS. So I know *why*, just not sure the reality will live up to your excitement.
I have an RX8640 you can try running win2k8 on if you’re feeling brave.
I have a feeling that machine would be both expensive to buy from you, and pretty much impossible to ship. Would be sick, though!
Back in the mid 90s I actually managed a couple of DEC Alpha machines, including a huge Alpha Server 8200?, with, ASFIR, 4 CPUs (400Mhz?), 2GB (or 4GB) ram and huge amount of drives.
All running NT 3.51 and later upgraded to NT4.
One (Alpha Server 2000?) was actually used to beta test Windows 2000.
Compared to the Pentium 60/66/90 based servers (remember the notorious FPU bug?) we had back then, with 32MB / 64MB RAM, the high end Alphas were pretty amazing. (As in our own super computer).
Heck, for a couple of months I actually used the 8200 as my private workstation…. (it was the size of a large fridge)
Those were the days 🙂