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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

#51

Post by altintx »

sjsdaiuasgdia wrote: post #33
gosub100 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

IIRC, Win2000 would wait for most/all services to complete startup before showing the login UI. XP would allow login as soon as enough of the system was started to support it. The tradeoff is that you might have slow performance from HDD thrashing while everything else finishes starting up. It's been 20+ years so it's possible I had it wrong then, or remember it wrong now.

XP started drivers and services in parallel. 2000 started them serially. That was the difference in startup speed.

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

#52

Post by sillywalk »

p_l wrote: post #20
baron3dl wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

As a side-note, it's interesting that all of the released versions of NT on Alpha were 32 bit.

Raymond Chen has a blog post[0] about using Alpha to develop 64bit Windows before Itanium hardware was available.

Virtually Fun has some more excellent background on finding a compiler for 64bit Windows[1], finding a copy of Windows 2000 64bit for Alpha AXP[2], and a detailed article about making an ISO from the found copy.

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/technet-...

[1] https://virtuallyfun.com/2023/05/05/hiding-in-plain-sight-th...

[2] https://virtuallyfun.com/2023/05/15/windows-2000-64-bit-for-...

[3] https://virtuallyfun.com/2023/06/26/axp64-2210-installation-...

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

#53

Post by keyringlight »

jeffbee wrote: post #35
spyrja wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Win9X wasn't Win2k's ancestor. Win2k was from the house of Windows NT. WinXP was the merger of the two lines. Probably very few people switched from Windows 98 to Windows 2000. That wasn't considered an upgrade path. That was installing a different operating system. Technically Windows ME existed, I guess.

I got curious and I had a windows xp ISO lying around, apparently it does support migrating from win98 onwards which surprised me a bit, win95 has to do a fresh install. From looking at the various .inf files it seems to pull a lot more information from a NT based starting point than 9x. I'm not sure if I'm curious enough to try a 98 to NT5 upgrade in a VM though.

Whether or not many people would want to do that upgrade/migration is another question, but similar to you I doubt the number was high.

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

#54

Post by p_l »

sillywalk wrote: post #52
p_l wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As a side-note, it's interesting that all of the released versions of NT on Alpha were 32 bit. Raymond Chen has a blog post[0] about using Alpha to develop 64bit Windows before Itanium hardware was available. Virtually Fun has some more excellent background on finding a compiler for 64bit Windows[1], finding a copy of Windows 2000 64bit for Alpha AXP[2], and a detailed article about making an ISO from the found copy.…

Yes, the released, as well as final RC for 2000, were still 32bit mode.

There's a quote, possibly from Raymond Chen, about how they originally naively thought they will be able to just change size of an int, IIRC, and that backfired seriously.

That said, 64bit release of windows was supposed to happen on Alpha had Compaq not pulled the plug

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

#55

Post by cube00 »

GeekyBear wrote: post #27
hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing better is server 2003.

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).

The dog fooding of building NT on daily builds of that same kernel was an impressive commitment to quality.

Yes, it slows down velocity and we can't certainly have that (/s) but it's a nice glimpse into what engineering that prioritises quality could look like.

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

#56

Post by 486sx33 »

keyringlight wrote: post #53
jeffbee wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Win9X wasn't Win2k's ancestor. Win2k was from the house of Windows NT. WinXP was the merger of the two lines. Probably very few people switched from Windows 98 to Windows 2000. That wasn't considered an upgrade path. That was installing a different operating system. Technically Windows ME existed, I guess.

I got curious and I had a windows xp ISO lying around, apparently it does support migrating from win98 onwards which surprised me a bit, win95 has to do a fresh install. From looking at the various .inf files it seems to pull a lot more information from a NT based starting point than 9x. I'm not sure if I'm curious enough to try a 98 to NT5 upgrade in a VM though. Whether or not many people would want to do that upgr…

[dead]

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

#57

Post by sillywalk »

consumer451 wrote: post #44

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?

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!

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

#58

Post by sillywalk »

p_l wrote: post #54
sillywalk wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a side-note, it's interesting that all of the released versions of NT on Alpha were 32 bit. Raymond Chen has a blog post[0] about using Alpha to develop 64bit Windows before Itanium hardware was available. Virtually Fun has some more excellent background on finding a compiler for 64bit Windows[1], finding a copy of Windows 2000 64bit for Alpha AXP[2], and a detailed article about making an ISO from the found copy.…

Yes, the released, as well as final RC for 2000, were still 32bit mode. There's a quote, possibly from Raymond Chen, about how they originally naively thought they will be able to just change size of an int, IIRC, and that backfired seriously. That said, 64bit release of windows was supposed to happen on Alpha had Compaq not pulled the plug

After Compaq bought Tandem, they said they were going to port NonStop from MIPS to the Alpha[0], but then cancelled that for Itanium[1]. I'm not sure if NonStop was ported/expanded from 32bit to 64bit when it was running on MIPS.

[0] https://www.scmp.com/article/256948/compaq-port-himalaya-alp...

[1] https://www.informationweek.com/it-leadership/compaq-to-aban...

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

#59

Post by ahartmetz »

userbinator wrote: post #45
spyrja wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The pre-NT Windows architecture was interesting for its "hack value" (remember that expression?), but as a user, even a technically minded one, reliability and absence of arbitrary limitations was more important.

DOS-based Windows had two main things going for it at the time, for users: It could run on average computers, and as you mentioned it could run most DOS software - most worked from Windows and all by simply stopping at DOS in the boot process (I almost always did the latter, I had no excess performance to give away).

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

#60

Post by mrandish »

jeffbee wrote: post #35
spyrja wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Win9X wasn't Win2k's ancestor. Win2k was from the house of Windows NT. WinXP was the merger of the two lines. Probably very few people switched from Windows 98 to Windows 2000. That wasn't considered an upgrade path. That was installing a different operating system. Technically Windows ME existed, I guess.

> very few people switched from Windows 98 to Windows 2000

I was one of them. I went from ME to 2k and it was definitely a big step up.

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