alt.hn

7/5/2026 at 1:47:44 PM

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

 https://raymii.org/s/blog/Run_Windows_2000_for_Dec_Alpha_on_a_new_es40_fork.html

by jandeboevrie

7/5/2026 at 5:05:49 PM

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

7/5/2026 at 5:35:23 PM

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 hoops

by hadlock

7/5/2026 at 8:13:12 PM

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

by mysterydip

7/5/2026 at 5:31:42 PM

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

7/5/2026 at 5:59:44 PM

> It really wasn't a bad operating system

It was a wonderful operating system. It provided consumer desktop essentials (Plug & Play, DirectX 7, ACPI power management, Windows Driver Model (WDM), and support for consumer I/O interfaces like USB and Firewire) alongside a modernized UI, all running atop the NT kernel. I was extremely lucky to receive a free copy of Windows 2000 Pro as a student, because I rode that horse for years.

Then Microsoft added a green start button and dark blue backgrounds and packaged Win2k for home users as Windows XP.

by roadbuster

7/5/2026 at 6:08:47 PM

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)

by gosub100

7/5/2026 at 6:57:00 PM

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.

by sjsdaiuasgdia

7/5/2026 at 7:29:24 PM

> The tradeoff is that you might have slow performance from HDD thrashing while everything else finishes starting up.

You would often get audio buffer underuns on the startup sound, if enabled, especially if you had auto login.

by toast0

7/5/2026 at 7:18:38 PM

No, that's pretty accurate as I recall. Windows 2000 took a bit, but when it was up, it was up. Windows XP would pop you into what appeared to be a functional desktop quickly, but it was still loading in the background, and some things just sort of sat there for awhile. Win2K was much more predictable. When I wasn't on a Mac during my consultant days, it was on Windows 2000, because it was much more stable than the 98 clients.

by classichasclass

7/5/2026 at 6:23:03 PM

Windows 2000 was the first release of NT5. That's what made it 2000.

Windows ME on the other hand...

by doublerabbit

7/5/2026 at 6:12:40 PM

[dead]

by Borg3

7/5/2026 at 7:03:16 PM

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.

by jeffbee

7/5/2026 at 7:22:29 PM

There are a few APIs from Windows 7 that are great improvements over Win32, such as DirectWrite and Direct2D.

by projektfu

7/5/2026 at 6:24:38 PM

You can fix Windows7/8/10/11 with Retrobar

by bobmcnamara

7/5/2026 at 5:12:50 PM

The only thing better is server 2003.

by hsbauauvhabzb

7/5/2026 at 6:17:10 PM

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).

by GeekyBear

7/5/2026 at 5:30:16 PM

Having had consulting jobs working with Windows servers around 2015, this was ruined for me. Sooo many ancient out of support 2003 severs. Seeing it actually triggers some light anxiety ("oh no not another one!")

by RamRodification

7/5/2026 at 6:25:55 PM

I ran 2003 on my laptop for ages. Only tricky part was installing the audio stack.

by bobmcnamara

7/5/2026 at 4:39:47 PM

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

7/5/2026 at 5:08:27 PM

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

7/5/2026 at 6:38:15 PM

> I forget that what I miss was not the system, but the community on the system.

Same. I had VMS running on an AS200 next to a beautiful X terminal, just like the computer lab at school. But my dad wasn't sitting next to me, hunting and pecking away at his old C.Itoh terminal. None of the usual suspects were across the table, locked into their favorite MUDD. And so on. I miss them all so much.

by xenophonf

7/5/2026 at 6:46:00 PM

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

7/5/2026 at 7:32:44 PM

> 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

7/5/2026 at 7:12:55 PM

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!

by imoverclocked

7/5/2026 at 7:10:20 PM

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

7/5/2026 at 3:42:42 PM

Emulating Alpha on x86_64 is definitely not a thing the Alpha designers foresaw. :-)

by allenrb

7/5/2026 at 4:24:55 PM

But does it have FX!32 working to run important x86 software in there?

by saltcured

7/5/2026 at 4:43:58 PM

The Turduckin endures.

by dboreham

7/5/2026 at 7:55:55 PM

I love how egregiously bad CDE looks compared to Windows. Whoever made that call, dios mio.

by jeberle

7/5/2026 at 5:52:20 PM

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

7/5/2026 at 3:44:47 PM

did anyone ever run W2k on an ES40 in production?

the only dec hardware I ever touched that ran windows was an AlphaServer 1000, and my assignment was to get it back to running VMS. though, I'll admit now, i goldbricked a bit and spent some time trying out Digital UNIX first.

by baron3dl

7/5/2026 at 4:50:45 PM

Microsoft never shipped Alpha support for win2k in the release builds, but only the betas and release candidates, so I doubt anyone ran it in "production".

by monocasa

7/5/2026 at 5:03:29 PM

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.

by baron3dl

7/5/2026 at 5:32:03 PM

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 details made for Alpha support (including extended support for software like FX!32) are now backbone of x86-on-ARM support in windows ARM builds

by p_l

7/5/2026 at 4:00:29 PM

I had to run NT4 on a 4100 in prod at my very first Internet startup job.

We also had a bunch of 1000 and 1000a's, and an AlphaStation running AltaVista firewall all on NT.

An ALR 6x6 (6* Pentium Pros) was faster for Windows than the fully loaded out AS4100 IIRC. Except that the 4100 supported more memory and PCI slots IIRC.

by nyrikki

7/5/2026 at 3:57:43 PM

I never saw Win 2K on Alpha...

I worked at a mostly DEC shop for a while. They had transitioned their main product from VAX to Alpha. Most of the systems ran Digital Unix and VMS, but there was an AlphaServer with NT 4.

by icedchai

7/5/2026 at 4:09:51 PM

My friend Eric, had an unused Alpha server 4100 under his desk...It was used for testing more than a year ago, ( in the early 2000s ). He asked for the install disks, and got a entire box of everything it came with VMS/Ultrix/NT 3.5.. We tried to use raid, but none of the drivers worked. So what... we loaded NT, then Digital UNIX, and finally VMS, but we knew nothing about VMS, so one disk for NT, and one for Digital UNIX. The floating point was outstanding. just wish there was more software for it.

by ForOldHack

7/5/2026 at 4:26:52 PM

OK, I imagine that involved quite some challenges. Well done. But why? I fail to see a purpose. Is it just a DOOM runs on my smart toaster kind of thing or something that has production value?

by _blk