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.”
“Most Alpha systems ran Digital Unix and VMS, not Windows.”
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- Hacker News
- From Google, DEC Alpha is a RISC architecture, but I can’t see what es40 is, unless it’s just a fork code name?
- by mrandish
- es40 is an emulator that emulates an AlphaServer ES40 series system.
- This is really cool! There have been many DEC Alpha emulators over the years, but none have been capable of running Windows NT.by orra
- Both screenshots of Windows 2000 and OpenVMS are in my opinion the peak UI's.by ivolimmen
- I love how egregiously bad CDE looks compared to Windows. Whoever made that call, dios mio.by jeberle
- 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
- Never knew this. Thought the emulator would always slower.by aghuang
- 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 - As a lucky kid, I remember watching in awe, a postage stamp size video from a CD-ROM encyclopedia on my 486SX. Around the same time I got to see some Sun SPARCstations with an insane 32MB of RAM!by sillywalk
- Emulating Alpha on x86_64 is definitely not a thing the Alpha designers foresaw. :-)by allenrb
- But does it have FX!32 working to run important x86 software in there?by saltcured
- 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 - > 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 you had seen the RC2 disks, it would have been obvious. RC2 had different disks for Intel and Alpha, RC3 only had Intel disk(s). NT4 had all archs on the same disk, so it would have made some sense to be confused.
by toast0 - AFAICR, Linux was far easier to run stuff on by that point. Playing with different variants of Unix was certainly fun though! I remember being blown away by an Irix+OpenGL demo on “deprecated hardware” that a friend had access to in the late 90s. After growing up with a Borland compiler in dos and programming graphics in the most naive of manners possible, seeing accelerated graphics that outmoded any xscreensaver on my fancy 200Mhz Pentium Linux box opened my eyes a little more!
- 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 - I also have an ES47 (running Linux)! Would you send me an email to my username at gmail? I've been working on a remote management tool for the ES47 that allows controlling the fan speeds that you might be interested in.by mattst88
- 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.
by baron3dl - 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
- Ton's of people ran w2k as a 'better desktop windows'. I did, and pretty much all the developers I knew back then did.by kjs3
- I used to run Windows 2000 in production and it never gave me even a bit of grief.
That said, it was mostly just an internet gateway/dhcp server. But gave me less issues than the Win 98 clients.
by protocolture - I had windows 2000 on a laptop in the 2008 2010 era. It was already old at the time, but I actually preferred it to XP and certainly vista. You get NT which is nice compared to dos based 95/98/me but you get those tried and true aesthetics, which work well. I’m not sure I’d go back to it now, but it definitely sticks out as the high point of windows in that time period.
- The only thing better is server 2003.
- I daily drove it in the 2000s, and loved it. Later I used it for my server VMs due to the small memory footprint and fast remote response. If it supported current applications, I’d still be using itby mysterydip
- 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.by spyrja
- 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 hoopsby hadlock
- Windows 2000 really was the best desktop OS from release until 2002 at least.
Linux was incomplete, Sun and SGI were dead except for servers, classic Mac OS was a crashy dinosaur, and Mac OS X was a slow mess. I bought 10.0 on release day and installed it on a dual core G4, almost the top Mac you could buy. It was not usable, much as I wanted to. (The real v1 was Mac OS X 10.2.)
Windows 2000 was designed for real professional apps because late ‘90s Microsoft had a serious appetite for taking over the workstation market. Microsoft acquired companies like Softimage, the leading 3D CGI app, and rebuilt their previously Unix-based products on Windows. This pro usability focus reflected back into the OS itself.
This didn’t last because Microsoft unified the Windows 95/98 consumer lineage into NT/2000, so starting with XP there wasn’t a pro Windows anymore. They had decisively won the workstation market and saw no need to invest anything more (just as happened with browsers). So 2000 remains the last time a major tech company built a pure pro desktop OS. Mac was always a consumer/pro hybrid, and ultimately Apple did it better than Microsoft.
by pavlov