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

59 points by jandeboevrie 5 hours ago | 28 comments

bartvk 2 hours ago

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?

hadlock 59 minutes ago

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

spyrja 2 hours ago

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.

roadbuster 35 minutes ago

> 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.

gosub100 26 minutes ago

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)

doublerabbit 12 minutes ago

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

Windows ME on the other hand...

Borg3 22 minutes ago

[dead]

bobmcnamara 10 minutes ago

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

hsbauauvhabzb 2 hours ago

The only thing better is server 2003.

GeekyBear 18 minutes ago

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).

RamRodification 2 hours ago

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!")

bobmcnamara 9 minutes ago

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

andrewjf 2 hours ago

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

baron3dl 2 hours ago

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.

allenrb 3 hours ago

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

saltcured 3 hours ago

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

dboreham 2 hours ago

The Turduckin endures.

orra 42 minutes ago

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

baron3dl 3 hours ago

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.

monocasa 2 hours ago

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".

baron3dl 2 hours ago

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.

p_l 2 hours ago

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

nyrikki 3 hours ago

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.

icedchai 3 hours ago

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.

ForOldHack 3 hours ago

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.

hsbauauvhabzb 2 hours ago

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

classichasclass 2 hours ago

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

justsomehnguy 58 minutes ago

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

_blk 3 hours ago

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?