I'd love to get my hands on an Alpha. They were running at insane speeds compared with Intel back then. Have you tried at Betaarchive for those fabled 64bit versions of W2k?
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Windows XP on PowerPC?
- Thread starter supremeleader573
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Ah, I just read Chen's article. It seems that there was no 64bit Windows on Alpha but that Alphas were used to develop 64 bit Windows Server for Itanium before Itaniums hit the market. The article did mention that Alphas were also used for 32 bit Windows development. I think the confusion might have stemmed from this line:
Raymond Chen discusses running Windows Server 64-bit on Alpha AXP
docs.microsoft.com
Dang - no screenshots of the beast!Raymond Chen discusses running Windows Server 64-bit on Alpha AXP
docs.microsoft.com
Nah. Looks like a completely internal project à la Marklar. No idea how it even got seen outside of Redmond. It would be quite the leak for any of those dev builds to hit the internet. Not sure what you could do with them, though, even if you could get them to run.
FWIW, Beta 2 of XP for Itanium contains these gems:
(Logon banner - all the other edtions have been updated to "Whistler" branding and the new logo)
(About Windows banner)
(Logon banner - all the other edtions have been updated to "Whistler" branding and the new logo)
(About Windows banner)
XP existed for Itanium. Windows 2000 was the only "NT-based" version of Windows that was only ever publicly released on a single architecture.
PowerPC was supported from 3.51 to 4.0.
Alpha was supported from the very beginning to the late Windows 2000 betas. (Note that Windows on Alpha was only ever 32-bit. The Windows 2000 betas were supposed to add 64-bit support, but Alpha support was dropped before this happened.)
MIPS was supported from the beginning to 4.0.
Public Windows 2000 was only ever x86 32-bit. (There was a *VERY* late Windows Server 2000 Datacenter Edition for Itanium, but it was never "public" - it was given to a very select few companies that asked for it.)
Itanium support officially arrived with "Windows XP 64-bit Edition" - not "Windows XP Home Edition 64-bit" or "Windows XP Professional Edition 64-bit", the Itanium edition was its own separate "64-bit Edition" solely for the Intaium. It was a strange hodgepodge of features - most of the actual high-end business "Professional" features, while missing some Pro features, and quite a few Home features.
That edition was *VERY* short-lived. HP was the only company that sold Itanium "workstations", and they only lasted about a year. Everyone saw that Itanium was only making actual sales in the server market, so MS discontinued XP for Itanium after a short time (it doesn't support later Itanium CPUs,) and concentrated on Windows Server 2003 support.
PowerPC support was limited to IBM/Motorola "PReP" compatible systems. Apple had been planning on making the Power Macintosh line PReP compatible, but it was determined to be too hard, so parts of the Macintosh firmware were added to PReP's replacement standard: CHRP. Apple was then planning on making Macs CHRP-compliant, but Steve Jobs came back, and both Mac clones and CHRP compliance went out the window.
Notably, one Mac clone maker was poised to release a PowerPC 750-equipped, CHRP-compliant Mac clone,Motorola! But Steve Jobs... Motorola even got as far as to ship review units to magazines before they discontinued their Mac clone line. Mac OS 8 even has support for CHRP-based systems, but they had to be whitelisted by Apple. The only company to actually ship CHRP-based systems was IBM, who only supported their flavor of UNIX (AIX) on it.
And Windows NT4.0 never supported CHRP, PowerPC support having been discontinued before CHRP systems shipped.
We were *VERY* close to having a Motorola CHRP system, though, that if it had shipped, might have convinced Microsoft to keep developing PowerPC support through Windows 2000 at least.
But, to get back to the question at hand - no, having the source code for Windows XP wouldn't be sufficient to just "target: PowerPC" in the compile engine. The oddball Itanium edition makes it clear that by XP, they had lost cross-platform compatibility, and it had to be added back for Windows Server 2003 (which later served as the basis for Windows XP for AMD64/x86-64 systems. Yes, that's right, Windows XP 64-bit on your Athlon 64 or late Pentium 4 was actually Windows Server 2003 with a Windows XP skin, rather than a direct compile of Windows XP. It even used the Server 2003 service pack numbering rather than the XP SP numbering.)
*POSSIBLE*, sure. But with a LOT of code wrangling.
PowerPC was supported from 3.51 to 4.0.
Alpha was supported from the very beginning to the late Windows 2000 betas. (Note that Windows on Alpha was only ever 32-bit. The Windows 2000 betas were supposed to add 64-bit support, but Alpha support was dropped before this happened.)
MIPS was supported from the beginning to 4.0.
Public Windows 2000 was only ever x86 32-bit. (There was a *VERY* late Windows Server 2000 Datacenter Edition for Itanium, but it was never "public" - it was given to a very select few companies that asked for it.)
Itanium support officially arrived with "Windows XP 64-bit Edition" - not "Windows XP Home Edition 64-bit" or "Windows XP Professional Edition 64-bit", the Itanium edition was its own separate "64-bit Edition" solely for the Intaium. It was a strange hodgepodge of features - most of the actual high-end business "Professional" features, while missing some Pro features, and quite a few Home features.
That edition was *VERY* short-lived. HP was the only company that sold Itanium "workstations", and they only lasted about a year. Everyone saw that Itanium was only making actual sales in the server market, so MS discontinued XP for Itanium after a short time (it doesn't support later Itanium CPUs,) and concentrated on Windows Server 2003 support.
PowerPC support was limited to IBM/Motorola "PReP" compatible systems. Apple had been planning on making the Power Macintosh line PReP compatible, but it was determined to be too hard, so parts of the Macintosh firmware were added to PReP's replacement standard: CHRP. Apple was then planning on making Macs CHRP-compliant, but Steve Jobs came back, and both Mac clones and CHRP compliance went out the window.
Notably, one Mac clone maker was poised to release a PowerPC 750-equipped, CHRP-compliant Mac clone,Motorola! But Steve Jobs... Motorola even got as far as to ship review units to magazines before they discontinued their Mac clone line. Mac OS 8 even has support for CHRP-based systems, but they had to be whitelisted by Apple. The only company to actually ship CHRP-based systems was IBM, who only supported their flavor of UNIX (AIX) on it.
And Windows NT4.0 never supported CHRP, PowerPC support having been discontinued before CHRP systems shipped.
We were *VERY* close to having a Motorola CHRP system, though, that if it had shipped, might have convinced Microsoft to keep developing PowerPC support through Windows 2000 at least.
But, to get back to the question at hand - no, having the source code for Windows XP wouldn't be sufficient to just "target: PowerPC" in the compile engine. The oddball Itanium edition makes it clear that by XP, they had lost cross-platform compatibility, and it had to be added back for Windows Server 2003 (which later served as the basis for Windows XP for AMD64/x86-64 systems. Yes, that's right, Windows XP 64-bit on your Athlon 64 or late Pentium 4 was actually Windows Server 2003 with a Windows XP skin, rather than a direct compile of Windows XP. It even used the Server 2003 service pack numbering rather than the XP SP numbering.)
*POSSIBLE*, sure. But with a LOT of code wrangling.
There is also an Itanium version of this Server-2003-skinned-as-XP, called "Windows XP 64-Bit Edition Version 2003". It's main feature is support for the Itanium 2 iirc. But yeh, support for it was quickly dropped.
And early betas of the AMD64 "XP" are also branded like that.
I wonder whether any of those review units have survived or if Motorola trashed them all because of licensing issues.
Ironically, I just got an original Microsoft Surface RT for free. I now have at least one system of each architecture supported by a Windows NT derivative except an Alpha.
Yep. MIPS Magnum R4000 - AKA "Generic MIPS workstation" :-D If only AlphaStations weren't $800 on eBay.....
edit: And a couple SGI systems, but those don't run NT...
You probably knew this already but MS actually did port Excel and Word to MIPS and PPC even though only the Alpha port was sold commercially. You can find them via one of the posts here:
A rare example of a native Windows app on this architecture.
Yep. On my PowerPC Windows NT system (the only one I use with any actual regularity) I use the 16-bit x86 "Windows 3.1" version of Internet Explorer 5, because it's the newest web browser that will run on it! (I use the web browser almost exclusively to download files to the system, not for actual web browsing, since it doesn't support modern encryption.)
Hmm, must check the junk cupboard at work. Take it you are US based, not UK (I’m in the UK - they aren’t light)
Shouldn't cost $800. I just got an absolutely mint condition AlphaStation 250 4/266 for ~$400, and there were cheaper ones than that available. I greatly overpaid for what it is, but I wanted it and it's worth it to me so whatever...
I remember seeing the ads for that in MacWorld and MacAddict! The StarMax 6000...what a beast that system was. The case looked awful, but with the spec sheet that it boasted, I certainly didn't care. I remember wondering how it would stack up against Power Computing's vaunted PowerTower Pro 250.
I'd read a lot about CHRP and PReP and the promise it held for the future of the Mac. My mind swirled with the idea of being able to boot a Mac into OS/2, OS 9 and Windows NT...
Nowadays OS X and NT are covered - I'll need to give my copy of ArcaOS (OS/2) a try on my Intel Macs.
All of this talk about Windows versions is making me a bit nostalgic.
My first computer that was more or less "mine"(my dad's hand-me-down) was a 386 running Windows 3.11. That's also what the computers at school had, and I remember a bit of chest-thumping because I got to use his "nice" computer running Windows 95 sometimes(including getting on AOL) and "knew" how to use it. Of course I later used Windows 95, and then 98, pretty extensively.
For a while, my dad was an MS Action Pack subscriber. I can remember a Beta disk of Windows 2000 coming in the mail, and with his permission(he had no interest in it) I almost immediately installed it on my computer. I fell in love immediately. When the retail release came in the mail, I was treated to a rock-table and just all around good OS. He went a different direction, waited for the forthcoming Windows ME, and used that. To his credit, he ran a home business(income tax preparation) on software that was still DOS based up until he got out of the business in ~2006, and right around the turn of the century the developers told him that, at the time, they had serious issues getting everything to work correctly on Win2K/WinNT and advised sticking to 98 or ME. When they finally got it working on XP, it was ugly but at least functional.
I hated the XP UI when I first saw it, but grew to like it. XP and Windows 7 both treated me very well over the years, and I was on Windows 7 when I finally jumped ship onto Macs. BTW, I almost always used the classic theming.
In my own little side business, among other things I scavenge a bit of remaining business serving one particular model of mass spectrometer-the HP 5971(and the similar 5972) that's getting way up in years, but is still serviceable for a lot of folks(I kept one going also at my last job as a back-up to our main one). The "inner workings" are complex enough that no one has tried to reverse engineer or come up with a non-HP/Agilent alternative to the software that operates it. Interestingly enough too, it uses the supposedly standard HPIB for communication, but will only interface if a Hewlett Packard/Agilent card is installed in the system. In any case, the newest version of software that can operate the 5971/5972 without a lot of extra effort is MSD Chemstaton G1701BA, which was first released in 1997(and development ended in 2000, so I have disks branded both HP and Agilent). It was intended to run on Windows NT 4.0, but works perfectly on Windows 2000, and Win2K adds a few advantages like better USB support and much, much better driver availability. I know folks who have hacked it to run on XP and newer(I've seen a recent hack for Win10), but they require a lot of monkeying around and aren't particularly stable or require a mis-match of different pieces of software. Consequently, for those of us leaving a system in a customer's hands, Win2K is the gold standard of where we leave them operating. By extension also, there's one particular Dell tower that is a "sweet spot" of running Win2K well, but also has SATA and even a PCIe slot. The last one I set up got a nice GPU to let it run a 1080p monitor.
My first computer that was more or less "mine"(my dad's hand-me-down) was a 386 running Windows 3.11. That's also what the computers at school had, and I remember a bit of chest-thumping because I got to use his "nice" computer running Windows 95 sometimes(including getting on AOL) and "knew" how to use it. Of course I later used Windows 95, and then 98, pretty extensively.
For a while, my dad was an MS Action Pack subscriber. I can remember a Beta disk of Windows 2000 coming in the mail, and with his permission(he had no interest in it) I almost immediately installed it on my computer. I fell in love immediately. When the retail release came in the mail, I was treated to a rock-table and just all around good OS. He went a different direction, waited for the forthcoming Windows ME, and used that. To his credit, he ran a home business(income tax preparation) on software that was still DOS based up until he got out of the business in ~2006, and right around the turn of the century the developers told him that, at the time, they had serious issues getting everything to work correctly on Win2K/WinNT and advised sticking to 98 or ME. When they finally got it working on XP, it was ugly but at least functional.
I hated the XP UI when I first saw it, but grew to like it. XP and Windows 7 both treated me very well over the years, and I was on Windows 7 when I finally jumped ship onto Macs. BTW, I almost always used the classic theming.
In my own little side business, among other things I scavenge a bit of remaining business serving one particular model of mass spectrometer-the HP 5971(and the similar 5972) that's getting way up in years, but is still serviceable for a lot of folks(I kept one going also at my last job as a back-up to our main one). The "inner workings" are complex enough that no one has tried to reverse engineer or come up with a non-HP/Agilent alternative to the software that operates it. Interestingly enough too, it uses the supposedly standard HPIB for communication, but will only interface if a Hewlett Packard/Agilent card is installed in the system. In any case, the newest version of software that can operate the 5971/5972 without a lot of extra effort is MSD Chemstaton G1701BA, which was first released in 1997(and development ended in 2000, so I have disks branded both HP and Agilent). It was intended to run on Windows NT 4.0, but works perfectly on Windows 2000, and Win2K adds a few advantages like better USB support and much, much better driver availability. I know folks who have hacked it to run on XP and newer(I've seen a recent hack for Win10), but they require a lot of monkeying around and aren't particularly stable or require a mis-match of different pieces of software. Consequently, for those of us leaving a system in a customer's hands, Win2K is the gold standard of where we leave them operating. By extension also, there's one particular Dell tower that is a "sweet spot" of running Win2K well, but also has SATA and even a PCIe slot. The last one I set up got a nice GPU to let it run a 1080p monitor.