[Info-vax] [OT] Early 64-bit test build of Windows 2000 for Alpha found

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 6/6/2023 8:28 AM, bill wrote:
>> I had been a beta tester for Microsoft and tried the betas of Win 2K for
>> Alpha. They more or less worked, but Red Hat Linux worked much better on
>> that hardware (I think I had an Alphastation 200? IIRC, it was a 233MHz
>> Alpha CPU.)

233 Mhz must have been either a 200 or a 255.

>> I'm sure I threw away those CDs long ago, even before I stopped using
>> Windows.
> 
> We had Windows 2000 running on some Alphas at the University.
> They all, eventually, moved to Linux or were just abandoned.
> The reason.  Something that has been said about VMS here
> numerous times.  No applications.  Users don't buy machines
> because of the architecture or operating system.  They buy
> it to get a job done and if they can't get the applications
> to do that the system is worthless.  In this day and age where
> less and less programming is being done in-house this is an
> even more important issue.

Software is important.

I believe the target software for Windows / Alpha was
database software.

Back then databases was one of the few thing that could
benefit from 64 bit.

Arne