As I was preparing the Windows NT RISC exhibit for VCF west, I realized that I’m missing a rather important piece of the history. While I will be showing the potentially last DEC Alpha Windows build ever – AXP64 2210, I don’t have anything earlier than NT 3.51. I would be nice to showcase the very first RTM version – NT 3.1. From time perspective, NT did not get popular until the version 3.5 and later. Windows NT 3.1 would be considered rare even on a 386, let alone on a RISC CPU! So what RISC hardware does Windows NT 3.1 run on?
The early non-x86 versions of Windows NT are absolutely fascinating, and finding a machine that can run one of these versions has always been high on my list, together with the various Itanium versions of Windows. I can’t quite explain what’s so exciting and attractive about it, but it feels like you’re doing something unholy, something you’re not supposed to be doing. Especially the later versions, deeper into the Wintel era, feel like they’re illegal.
When Win NT 3.51 was released I was part of a team that helped benchmark Alpha, Pentium, PowePC, and MIPS workstations running NT. Byte Magazine published the results which lead to the demise of MIPS and PowerPC. MIPS being too slow, PowerPC being too expensive.
Alpha was such a shame to lose. HP had many ISA’s in the IP portfolio, and binned them all in favour of the shitshow that is (was?) Itanium. Had HP and Intel committed to Alpha, we could have had an ~ISA trifecta now with Alpha in the high end, x86 in the middle end/consumer, and ARM in the low-end/portable. Instead, x86 gets shoehorned into basically everything, with ARM dominating in smartphones/tablet and other embedded uses.
The123king,
Yes, agree! Alpha had great potential, but for better or worse intel, as the dominant CPU company, had a much larger sphere of influence. Even though alpha had plenty of merit, I don’t feel the market was a meritocracy, Alpha was ahead of it’s time with 64bit, but it was treated as a second class citizen by partners. I get the impression microsoft just wanted to use alpha to gain business leverage with intel, but otherwise they didn’t do alpha justice. Windows support was half assed with a 32bit kernel and inadequate refinement & promotion.
I’ll add that my fever dream platform would have been an alliance between DEC, Apple and Be, for a 64-bit Alpha-based Macintosh running a BeOS based OS. I don’t think it would have ever really happened, but it tickles my pickle to think that most of the pieces were there at the time. A buyout of Apple by DEC might not have saved either company, but DEC sorely needed inroads to consumer hardware, Apple needed funding and a successor to the classic MacOS and 68k processors, and Be just needed a customer/buyout
I’ve used Win NT 3.51 (or was it 4.0) on Alpha. I had a friend who had one. It was dual socket. We were all immensely jealous. Quake ran incredibly well on it. Friends would benchmark all of there upgrades to their PC’s with quake, but despite what they spent they just couldn’t touch it. I always wanted one, Kind of disappointed I didn’t’ snap one up when they were cheap.