Birbla

Discussion summary

A user discussed running Windows 2000 on a DEC Alpha ES40 with some challenges, questioning its practical purpose. Several commenters shared experiences with Alpha systems and Windows/Unix compatibility, noting limited official support.

What the discussion says

  • Running Windows 2000 on Alpha was technically possible but not officially supported.
  • Most Alpha systems ran VMS or Digital Unix, with limited Windows support.
  • Some users ran NT4 on Alpha in production environments.
  • Official Alpha support for Windows 2000 was only in betas, not release builds.
“Microsoft never shipped Alpha support for Win2k in release builds.”
— ForOldHack
“Most Alpha systems ran Digital Unix and VMS, not Windows.”
— icedchai

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  • 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.

    by jasoneckert
  • 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.
    by mrandish
  • 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).
    by qubex
  • 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?

    by consumer451
  • Emulating Alpha on x86_64 is definitely not a thing the Alpha designers foresaw. :-)
    by allenrb
  • 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…

    by crmd
  • 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

    by andrewjf
  • 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?
    by bartvk

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