[HN Gopher] Windows NT 3.1 on Dec Alpha AXP
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Windows NT 3.1 on Dec Alpha AXP
Author : jandeboevrie
Score : 160 points
Date : 2023-10-03 04:47 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (virtuallyfun.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (virtuallyfun.com)
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| I worked at Digital on the Alpha/NT team at the time- the AXP 150
| "Jensen" was my daily driver desktop- that machine, like most
| other DEC hardware, was incredibly well built.
| scruffyherder wrote:
| Was the HAL really that compilcated?
|
| It was listed as one of the reasons why Compaq had bailed on
| NT.
|
| Also were you involved at all with the 64bit versions of NT?
|
| It's cool that checked build got out, and kind of funny how the
| compiler was hiding in plain sight for decades, but glad I
| spotted it.
| OnlyMortal wrote:
| We had one of those. Very quick though it ended up as a server
| for mp3 files for the office.
| mega_dingus wrote:
| DEC's relationship with MS was fascinating
|
| DEC sued MS due to Cutler's contribution to NT. DEC thought they
| could sue themselves into MS's good graces. They had embroidered
| polo shirts saying "Strategic Relationship", and saw several
| employees wearing them, and the phrase was repeated often
|
| DEC couldn't figure out why Office performed worse on Alpha than
| x86. They sent an employee to MS, only to find MS had a single
| build server stashed under some desk. MS was compiling Office
| with -O0, obviously doing the absolute bare minimum to check a
| box and move on with their lives.
|
| Source: I'm a former DEC employee
| panick21_ wrote:
| Yeah that relationship is strange. Seems to me they should have
| used that Cutler/MICA thing to make a huge amount of money and
| help their PC division.
|
| Not sure exactly what that 'Strategic Relationship' bought
| them. Seems to me all the companies making partnerships with
| Microsoft got shafted. Microsoft were always somehow able to
| use getting sued into making profitable deals for them in the
| long run. Because most companies didn't want to drive home the
| dagger, but rather get a few concessions on some kind of
| partnership.
| eej71 wrote:
| Former VMS user here. The whole "affinity" program that DEC
| keep pushing just seemed confused and pointless. I think by the
| time DEC management realized that they had "played themselves"
| it was too late. And then the Itanium thing happened.
| panick21_ wrote:
| > And then the Itanium thing happened.
|
| Its still funny to me how Itanium by its announcement
| basically killed or significantly delayed most other
| architectures only to turn out to be a dog.
| hapless wrote:
| Context is important.
|
| All of those competing architectures were becoming
| prohibitively expensive to enhance.
|
| Alpha never paid for itself, ever, the market share was too
| small. POWER and SPARC had multiple failed projects with
| enormous capital costs. MIPS hit a performance dead-end
| with such low market share SGI saw no way to rebuild. HPPA
| was bleeding HP dry.
|
| Itanium may have hastened their demise but all of these
| archs had the same core problems with investment returns.
| The writing was on the wall, and Intel was offering
| something people desperately wanted. (Unfortunately for
| everyone involved, it did not pan out.)
| panick21_ wrote:
| I that understand that context. But even so.
|
| POWER and SPARC were continue to be developed. And its
| hard to argue that either of them should have given up on
| their architecture. POWER is still developed. It probably
| made sense for Sun to stop working on SPARC eventually
| but not when Itanium was announced. Sun problem was just
| that they spend quite a bit of money, they were just
| never actually very good at designing processors.
|
| SGI was the most aggressive on telling everybody that
| Itanium would be the future. And they paid for that. They
| massively delayed MIPS upgrades (only to then start it
| again once they realized it would take a while for
| Itanium to come to the market). For a while after this
| they still made their money on MIPS and all their
| attempts to push Itanium pretty much fell flat. So
| arguable it was smart for them to plan to eventually dump
| MIPS but now how and when they tried to do it (Also I
| don't disagree that MIPS was a deadend).
|
| The deal HP got would have been fantastic if Intel had
| adopted PA-RISC 64-bit instead of Itanium. Given what
| happened HP wasn't really competitive with Sun 64-bit SMP
| servers and Sun made a killing on those things before the
| bubble. Once they bought Compaq and for a while were
| selling SMP servers based on Alpha.
|
| HP really should have continued to push Alpha after the
| bought Compaq. The already had VMS ported to Alpha and a
| large captured base willing to pay a little extra. They
| aggressively ported VMS to Itanium and thanks to the
| insane deal they made Intel had to manufacture them
| processors for a decade+.
|
| They are a large enough company and Alpha next few
| version had the chance to be really great, with things
| advanced vector extension and they had basically had the
| best processor team in the world.
|
| So yes, it was correct that all these companies wanted to
| drop their development cost, but doing so before you know
| really about Itanium and how good it was, that's
| questionable and messed up all the strategies. There was
| just an assumption that Itanium was gone be amazing.
| Granted, VLIW processors were all the hype. Sun also
| waste a bunch of money on VLIW processor technology in
| the 90s and unlike HP, they didn't it on Intel.
|
| Gordan Bell tried to hook up Alpha with Intel and make
| Alpha the 64-bit architecture that Intel went with. That
| would have been quite a different history. But for
| various reasons this didn't happen, and instead Intel
| went with HP and their next generation VLIW idea.
|
| P.S: It would have been pretty smart of Sun went in on
| Alpha in 1992, then they could have saved on development
| threw out the 90s. DEC had built up a huge fabs to handle
| Alpha but almost nobody bought it. They were really
| looking for a high value costumer and couldn't find one.
|
| Edit: > (Unfortunately for everyone involved, it did not
| pan out.)
|
| Well it wasn't unfortunate for everybody. Sun made quite
| a bit of money for a few more years with SPARC. And so
| did IBM with Power. I think those two companies were
| happy with the Itanium failure.
| lizknope wrote:
| I remember when Rick Belluzzo became CEO at SGI. He
| immediately started pushing Windows NT and Itanium
| abandoning IRIX and MIPS. A lot of people wondered why
| and it seemed like he was on the Microsoft payroll. Then
| he left after about 1.5 years in 1999 to join Microsoft.
| The whole thing still seems fishy to me.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Belluzzo
| panick21_ wrote:
| He pushed the same thing at HP as well. And the left
| Microsoft soon after as well.
|
| I think its more like that he was brought in by the board
| because those were his opinions.
|
| The board was sick of paying for development of MIPS and
| IRIX. The believed their future was massive multicore
| Itanium Windows IT systems. And because they wouldn't do
| any of the development but would make the same kind of
| profits, they would just print money.
|
| This of course backfired in a whole bunch of different
| ways.
| fredsmith219 wrote:
| I was running OpenVMS on VAX machines in that era. I couldn't
| figure out why DEC wanted NT, a single user operating system,
| for their mini computers. It made no sense to me. As an aside I
| had an OpenVMS gig as recently as 2020. It was fun to dust off
| my old DCL skills.
| tssva wrote:
| > I couldn't figure out why DEC wanted NT, a single user
| operating system, for their mini computers.
|
| When did you figure out that NT wasn't a single user
| operating system?
| postmodest wrote:
| NT's support for multiplexed interactive user sessions is
| piss-poor and has always come with a CAL restriction that
| was _absurd_. To this day there's no real "multiuser on
| consoles". (Yes yes, Citrix, rdp, Powershell Remoting,
| OpenSSH: compare those with X and, I guess, also SSH, and
| they suck.)
| tssva wrote:
| I'm not sure what the requirement for purchasing CALs has
| to do with whether an OS is multi-user or not. I have
| administered or been a user of interactive remote NT user
| session systems going back to beta testing the initial
| release of WinFrame in the mid 90's. Although worlds
| better today, I would not have called it pisspoor even
| then. Today RDS is much more capable than X on a unix
| system.
| tiahura wrote:
| As someone else in that space in the mid 90s I would
| agree that it was pretty remarkable nearly 30 years ago,
| especially considering the competition.
| Asooka wrote:
| Windows supports much richer remote access than anything
| built on X. I can log in using standard graphical login,
| my keyboard layouts carry over, audio is transparently
| handled, the screen size isn't tied to the existence of a
| remote monitor and 3d acceleration just works. And all
| that works out of the box with no setup necessary other
| than enabling it.
|
| On Linux, the only workflow I could get working was to
| use x11vnc to control an existing local session. To log
| in, I have to run x11vnc as root, pass it some magic
| cookie (I have no idea what that is still, but some magic
| incantation from SO did the trick), then once I log in,
| the running x11vnc dies, and I have to restart it as a
| regular user to control the session I just authenticated.
| password4321 wrote:
| A request for an official answer on CALs for Microsofts'
| SSH port is about to turn 6 years old:
|
| https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH/issues/926
| nullindividual wrote:
| RDP is great. It works fluidly over 56k modems. X "sucks"
| as it could never do that.
|
| This argument works both ways.
| icedchai wrote:
| I have an Alpha here with OpenVMS! It's fun to play around
| with. VMS was the first multi-user system I had access to,
| way back when I was a teenager in the late 80's.
| hypercube33 wrote:
| Fascinating. Dave over at Dave's Garage on YouTube talks about
| having a dec I believe -- if what you heard is true I wonder if
| it was the sole machine you're talking about. Maybe he can shed
| some light from the other side (Microsoft)
| maaarghk wrote:
| IIRC - he mentioned that someone _else_ had a DEC machine,
| and actually used it as their dev box. The dev with the DEC
| box person developed the kernel panic code, aka the blue
| screen of death - and blue was chosen because that's the
| default screen colour when the DEC box is turned on. The idea
| was to reset the colour to the default before printing the
| kernel panic message.
|
| So while DEC NT is sort of a footnote, it did have this
| pretty profound influence : )
| bitwize wrote:
| Windows 3.x's fatal exception screens were also blue.
| chungy wrote:
| Indeed; I think Windows 2.0 even had it. The story might
| sound plausible until the holes are poked in the
| hypothesis.
| jvert wrote:
| This is a bit of a game of telephone - NT Alpha shipped
| after NT 3.1 (i386 & Mips) and the port was done almost
| entirely by DEC. The blue screen preceded the Alpha and was
| really based on the color scheme from the firmware on the
| Mips workstation which Microsoft built internally. And, of
| course, the legendary SlickEdit, which was one of the
| original editors available on Win32.
|
| After NT 3.1, Microsoft assumed primary responsibility for
| NT Alpha, although there were also some great people at
| DECWest still involved.
|
| source: me, I'm the 'someone _else_' who owned all the
| Alpha stuff at Microsoft.
| Damogran6 wrote:
| The single best x86 computer I've ever used was a Dec Pentium
| 90...updated eventually to a Pentium II-300. Dec hardware was
| stupendous. Other systems were (obviously) faster and smaller
| and probably cooler and more power efficient, but their
| daughter card implimention of a CPU/RAM upgrade came from their
| obvious expertise in the Server/Scientific Workstation market
| with non x-86 architectures.
| rasz wrote:
| and resulted in project failure. Grant Saviers was
| responsible for PC division in early nineties.
|
| Oral History of Grant Saviers, part 2 of 2
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Od830KDrLUU
|
| Oral History of Grant Saviers part 1: http://archive.computer
| history.org/resources/access/text/201... Oral History of
| Grant Saviers part 2: https://archive.computerhistory.org/res
| ources/access/text/20...
|
| >As DEC's Corporate Vice President of PC Systems and
| Peripherals from 1990 to 1992 Grant successfully restarted
| DEC's PC business from a dormant state and grew revenues to
| $350M and break-even profitability in 18 months.
|
| @18 minute timestamp - they copied DELL strategy and did
| pretty good, business was growing and then DEC founder and
| CEO Ken Olsen decided to kill it. Grant got recruited to lead
| Adaptec.
| Damogran6 wrote:
| Awww. Boss had a Digital HiNote that seemed like a pretty
| nifty laptop compared to the competition at the time. https
| ://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_HiNote#/media/File:DEC...
| nxobject wrote:
| What a pity... it seemed like "what should DEC doing in
| the 90s, and how is it related to DEC's historical
| identity?" was the question when looking back at their
| 90's strategy - and it seemed like thoughtfully
| engineered hardware, even if on a commodity architecture,
| is one of them.
|
| Even if it wasn't the full stack integration from
| semiconductor fabrication, to OS and networking, that
| they were used to.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Killed by Ken Olson? That doesn't really make sense? They
| still had the PC division in like 1994 long after Ken was
| gone? Or am I getting the timeline wrong? Maybe just slowed
| it.
|
| I haven't yet listened to those Oral histories, but thanks
| for pointing out another that's focused on DEC.
|
| Love those oral histories. I wish sometimes they were
| longer and asked some more in detail question about certain
| things. But I guess you can't keep people for 10h straight.
|
| Edit: Where the hell is the video for Part 1? Doesn't
| exist?
| rasz wrote:
| From what I understand Ken killed the idea of using cheap
| commodity parts and moved PC division hardware design
| inhouse thus turning profit making venture into huge
| money sink.
|
| Part 1 doesnt exist in video form :(
| panick21_ wrote:
| The document I linked in my top-level post suggest that
| PC division was doing Ok by 1994 but that document is
| written by an insider who was not directly working on the
| PC stuff.
|
| > Part 1 doesnt exist in video form :(
|
| Guess I have to go old school and read it :)
| scruffyherder wrote:
| i'd probably blame the compiler. It's a weird mess of DEC
| objects being glued together to run on NT (Like the MIPS/PPC
| ones too). And if you wanted to make anything that for sure ran
| on all CPU type's you'd build /Od. Doing /O2 or /Ox was a
| recipe to run nowhere.
|
| The real shame is that 64bit beta compiler does such a
| substantially better job on the Alpha, but like everything else
| once everything started to gel, it suddenly imploded.
| mega_dingus wrote:
| Compiler was definitely somewhat to blame. I was on the C/C++
| team at the time, and C++ was definitely an afterthought on
| the existing C frontend, of a big 3-stage compiler
|
| I was on Digital UNIX so I didn't deal with VMS or Windows
| much. But Digital UNIX couldn't get out of their way with
| object file formats (COFF vs ELF and whatever else), on top
| of the compiler inefficiencies
|
| A recipe for disaster when the MS company employee doesn't
| want to do it in the first place, and you give them an
| artisan product that's hard to use properly
| scruffyherder wrote:
| damn so many potential questions, but I don't know if you
| can answer any as I know most people that were in those
| pivotal years are so cagey about it.
| panick21_ wrote:
| The more I learn about history of computing, the more it seems
| like DEC canceling of Project PRISM (and Project MICA) is at the
| center of a lot of history.
|
| Project MICA would have yield a very modern OS that could have
| supported both Unix and VMS interfaces and it would be only
| natural to add whatever Windows would come up with in addition to
| that. That PRISM and MICA seem to be a real paths forward for
| everything from workstation to multicore servers. We later saw
| with Alpha what DEC was capable of and PRISM also did a lot of
| compiler work that was also used for the Alpha compiler later.
| But that was quite a bit later of course.
|
| First of all, Cutler and lots of others went to Microsoft and
| developed Windows NT. Without Cutler, this project would look
| very different. Bill Gates was seriously arguing for having no
| virtual memory on this OS! Absolutely crazy to think what would
| have happened.
|
| If DEC had expanded, rather then contracted its team there, it
| would have been quite a difference, with two major companies
| developing a next generation OS in the area. I think DEC was
| generally more popular for technical people then Microsoft.
|
| Then for DEC, their workstation strategy went to MIPS/Ultrix
| witch was moderately successful but that whole thing was then
| killed in favor of Alpha/OSF1. This created a lot of bad blood by
| the people that were stuck on MIPS/Ultrix. DEC was one of the few
| companies that really went all in on the whole OSF stuff. Just
| like Sun, it might have been smarter to stick with BSD base
| rather then System V SVR4 base (love to hear from somebody inside
| about this topic).
|
| Because PRISM didn't happen over the next couple years the VAX
| line suffered from pretty bad price to performance. Management
| also seem not committed to VMS as OSF and NT became big parts of
| their strategy.
|
| So this post about running Windows NT+Alpha is really kind of a
| result of this canceling of PRISM/MICA.
|
| I reading some books on DEC now but during some online browsing I
| found this interesting document from somebody at DEC from late
| 1994: https://www.dgregscott.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2020/11/demise...
|
| Gorden Bell's Post Script on 'DEC is Dead, Long Live DEC' was
| also a great read.
| lizknope wrote:
| My school had at least a thousand DEC MIPS/Ultra/pmax
| workstations in 1993. When they announced they were killing the
| line we bought thousands of Suns and HP-UX machines. I remember
| seeing 2 Alpha machines in a special computer lab and I could
| log in but none of our engineering software ran on it. Maybe in
| a few years but I graduated by then.
| panick21_ wrote:
| This is kind of the crux of the issue. Alpha came out with
| great performance (but pretty expensive) in general but some
| issues related to performance of Unix and strings.
|
| They killed the MIPS/Ultrix line but gave people no path to
| move to Alpha/Ultrix. Ultrix was never ported to Alpha. Only
| Alpha/OSF1 so a fundamental hardware and software shift.
|
| Its easier to go to SPARC/SunOS or SPARC/Solaris and they had
| lots of machines from cheaper to more expensive. For schools
| they often bought the slightly cheaper workstations.
|
| Alpha 64bit wasn't really a hugely important feature that
| point in time. This again where starting with 32-bit PRISM
| would have been a better move.
|
| At the same time, their VAX line was still not Alpha, they
| bet on NVAX for quite a long time. So the VMS crowed didn't
| need to switch to Alpha.
|
| DEC wanted to make Alpha an industry standard but then they
| had little interest in working with Apple to get volume. The
| big workstation/server vendors had their own ISAs and since
| DEC also wanted to compete in those market simply adopting a
| new standard from DEC was just not gone happen. And as a new
| standard for lower priced machines it just not gone happen,
| 64-bit was totally wrong for markets like that and you would
| need Windows/Intel to even have a shot at that. It was also
| not good for embedded so DEC went with StrongARM.
|
| DEC just made really bad strategy choices starting in late
| 1988s. By 1986 they had started the VAX9000 project. That
| might be fine but by 1988 you have to realize that project
| was dead and simply kill it, and rush out VAX based on PRISM
| with nice high quality VMS port.
| glhaynes wrote:
| >Bill Gates was seriously arguing for having no virtual memory
| on this OS!
|
| That'd surprise me. This was a time when one of the major
| limiting factors to NT adoption was it needing "a lot" of RAM.
| And he'd had plenty of experience with virtual memory,
| including his own company's Xenix and OS/2.
| scruffyherder wrote:
| Had DEC no cancelled, NT would have never been, and Gates
| wouldn't have had the confidence to abandon OS/2.
|
| So in the end we all won, just Dec had to die.
|
| But DEC only saw Altavista as a toy, something for showing off
| big systems, or doing personal desktop search. The missed such
| incredible opportunity.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Not sure why you say windows not doing OS/2 is so great?
|
| OS/2 was a reasonable good OS and a history based on OS/2
| rather then Windows 95 and friends seems to be a pretty good
| path forward.
|
| And OS/2 being Microsoft and IBM would have made Microsoft
| not quite as powerful and dominate.
|
| > The missed such incredible opportunity.
|
| DEC was sold for around 10 billion, just a few years later
| Altavista alone was sold for around 2 billion.
|
| And Altavista was valued basically 0 in the Compaq
| acquisition. Compaq seem to really only value the Services
| division, everything else they didn't care about.
| ethanpil wrote:
| I remember reading during this era that Bill Gates' daily driver
| was a Dec Alpha workstation running NT... Don't remember the
| source.
| lizknope wrote:
| Does anyone remember the FX!32 binary translator?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FX!32
|
| I remember Linux had some version of this as well as the ability
| to run OSF/1 binaries.
| spandextwins wrote:
| That's great! I've got an old copy of visual studio and windows
| nt 3.1 in the closet, ran on mips, alpha, sparc and intel. Back
| when Microsoft was cross platform.
| Furball37 wrote:
| I'm 100% sure you're misremembering it running on SPARC, NT
| never ran on SPARC.
| dagw wrote:
| Correct. NT 3.1 ran on x86, Alpha and MIPS. NT 3.5 added
| PowerPC support. As you say, SPARC was never supported.
|
| Windows 2000 had both x86 and Alpha support up through the
| release candidate, but Alpha was dropped before final
| release. I actually had an Alpha workstation running Windows
| 2000 (for fun) back in the mists of time.
| omnibrain wrote:
| Later there was Windows XP 64-Bit Edition for Itanic
| Workstations and there was Windows Server up to 2008 R2 for
| Itanic Servers.
| scruffyherder wrote:
| Itanium XP was weird, it's like that super early AMD64
| version where more of the OS is 32bit than 64bit, with no
| high theming.
|
| It was still exciting at the time.
| Furball37 wrote:
| There's also the Beta Whistler AXP64 Build which was used
| to port Windows over to 64-bit before there was any 64-bit
| hardware available that could run NT. The people in the
| virtuallyfun discord got that running (I am part of that! I
| have an AlphaServer 800 5/500 next to me, with some hacks
| to the setup and telling it what HAL DLL to load it
| installed perfectly!)
| slamonjam wrote:
| There was an announcement that Intergraph would port Windows
| NT to SPARC: http://ftp.lanet.lv/ftp/sun-
| info/sunflash/1993/Jul/55.11-Sun...
|
| Guess it never went anywhere.
| kjs3 wrote:
| It didn't. There are rumors it got out to a handful of
| alpha/beta sites, but it was never a supported product.
| nullindividual wrote:
| After NT 3.1, I don't think Microsoft was ever a single
| processor architecture company.
|
| Beyond what NT supported, WinCE entered the picture in the very
| late 90s with ARM support among other architectures.
| monocasa wrote:
| Even before then, their cash cow was first BASIC
| implementations, on at least 6502 and 8080 relatively
| initially.
|
| Then Multiplan ran on most of the major microcomputers of the
| time.
|
| It's interesting that in their history, strict Wintel is more
| the anomaly in their history.
| markhahn wrote:
| instead of sparc, I wonder if you were remembering the i860,
| which certainly ran NT/OS2.
| dboreham wrote:
| There was a sparc port. I don't think it was ever public
| though.
| spandextwins wrote:
| Whoops, it wasn't sparc but PowerPC. I've also got a copy of
| CodeWarrior for sparc. Lots of oldies but goodies. A few big
| boxes of them. Someday I'll have to do something with them.
| Not sure if I'd get sued if I rip them and post them
| someplace.
| luma wrote:
| They still are, ARM is widely supported. There just aren't many
| other platforms in wide use today to target.
| treve wrote:
| Is it just me or has there been a resurgence of interest in the
| Windows 3 era of computing lately? Both actual machines and
| aesthetically I see things flash by a lot.
| nullindividual wrote:
| Nostalgia from elder millennials such as myself fuel this fire.
| When computing was much more of an academic exercise than
| commercial. When new, always incompatible hardware and software
| was released. Higher variety of OSes and processor
| architectures, which is interesting to those of us who were too
| young to purchase equipment.
|
| Etc...
| snerbles wrote:
| There were so many cool exotic systems that I read about in
| books and magazines, but never had the resources or knew the
| right people to actually play with. Parents and school admins
| barely knew what that newfangled information superhighway
| was, and later on _at best_ the stock response to "I want to
| learn C" was "we aren't paying $1,000 for Visual Studio" -
| GNU was a completely unknown concept until I stumbled across
| Slashdot some time in 2000. I imagine similar stories played
| out for many a mid-90s rural computer nerd.
|
| Second-hand nostalgia, if you will.
| M95D wrote:
| I think it's a backlash against touch-UIs forced on on destop
| users: everything is flat, lots and lots of empty wasted screen
| space, huge buttons, no borders, no scroll bars, etc.
| h2odragon wrote:
| I had a stack of surplus purchase alphas i used for all sorts of
| things. All but one of them we put SRM bios on when we got them;
| but that one was for some reason unable to take it and so was
| stuck with ARC and (as i recall) wouldn't boot linux.
|
| So I gave that one to my teenage nephew, who ran NT on it and
| became quite the Windows geek with a successful sysadmin career.
| "I ran NT on Alpha as a teen" is a pretty good resume enhancer, I
| guess.
| garciasn wrote:
| I had one of the UDBs back in the late 90s and used it as a MP3
| server/foot heater running RH 5.2 (I believe; it's been 25+
| years). My wife made me recycle it when we were cleaning out
| our house before our first child.
|
| I should have kept it as a combo doorstop and space heater.
| webdoodle wrote:
| After trying and failing to get MS Access to function on a DEC
| Alpha server, I finally gave up and installed SQL Server. It was
| a massive performance increase for many reasons, most of which
| related to MS Access being trash, but the better memory
| management in SQL server was part of it as well.
|
| Sadly MS dropped support for Alpha, and changed the pricing
| models on NT and SQL Server so much it became unaffordable for
| small businesses. In 2 cuts, I watched the future of databases
| crumble.
| _ph_ wrote:
| I saw once one :) For a very short time, the German computer
| retail chain "Vobis" would sell Dec Alpha machines with Windows
| NT 3.1. Too bad that didn't expand later on. It would have been
| great for the computer market, if more competition to Intel had
| existed longer.
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