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

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

#41

Post by toast0 »

crmd wrote: post #32

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…

> 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.

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

#43

Post by mysterydip »

bartvk wrote: post #13

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?

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 it

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

#44

Post by consumer451 »

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?

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

#45

Post by userbinator »

spyrja wrote: post #19
bartvk wrote: post #13

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?

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.

I personally think the hypervisor architecture of 9x and its predecessors (starting at Windows/386) was far more interesting and innovative; while Win2k and the NT line are "traditional" OSes, 9x and 3.x are effectively VM hypervisors that have default hardware pass-through. DOS applications had dismal performance on NT, if they even ran at all.

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

#46

Post by MobiusHorizons »

bartvk wrote: post #13

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?

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.

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

#47

Post by anthk »

bartvk wrote: post #13

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?

If you ran XP and Windows 98SE you got a close interface, even more with classic mode in XP, which was almost the same.

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

#48

Post by kjs3 »

bartvk wrote: post #13

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?

Ton's of people ran w2k as a 'better desktop windows'. I did, and pretty much all the developers I knew back then did.

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

#50

Post by pavlov »

bartvk wrote: post #13

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?

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.

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