I stumbled upon an absolute gem of a website over the weekend – Sophie Haskins’ Pizza Box Computer. On this site, Haskins details a number of ancient non-x86 workstations. All of the posts on the site are fun and interesting reads, so let’s pick one of her machines – a DEC Multia running Windows NT for Alpha –
The Multia was an attempt by Digital to make a lower-cost Alpha workstation for running Windows NT. There were Alpha and Intel Pentium models, and they use a lot of off-the-shelf PC components rather than custom Digital ones (hence its later name, the “Universal Desktop Box”). It’s quite tiny – so much so that it has laptop PCMCIA slots for expansion!
The latest post details getting Windows NT up and running on the Multia, and is certainly worth a read – like the rest of the site.
I’m pretty sure I saw this exact Multia on eBay – I was really considering it, but the rust was too much for me. Glad to see she got it working fine!
As for software on Alpha, until ARM, it was the most supported RISC target for NT. You had native versions of not just the server staples like SQL Server and Exchange, but Word and Excel up to 97, IE up to 5, (including…. RISC Comic Chat) VC++ and VB up to 6; and that’s just the Microsoft supported stuff.
One of the other interesting aspects is the fact NT 4 supports Terminal Server; so you can run an RDP server.
So better support than PowerPC ?
PPC was the least supported architecture for NT, second only to MIPS.
Basically the hierarchy is ARMv8 > ARMv7 > Alpha > Itanium > MIPS > PPC.
I miss all the old workstation/server companies. It feels like the computer industry devolved after 2000 in some ways, rather than the opposite.
Edited 2018-03-26 06:05 UTC
It’s cheaper to buy bulk products. Bulk products are generic products which use generic components. Which means consolidation of the market:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolidation_(business)
Yeah. That’s why they told us they needed to kill Alpha because Itanium was going to take over the world.
Not that I’m bitter or anything.
Itanium was a great success for Intel – just its mere announcements were enough to kill off most of competing CPU architectures…
As for the news here, the only pizza box computers I had contact with were Macintoshes LC475 in highschool …cute little machines.
It’s actually Compaq that killed Alpha (sadly the story doesn’t end here)..
Not sure how I could agree more, only maybe the date when the writing on the was written may be a bit sooner.
Yet, I can’t rid myself of my sparcstation & ultra, octane, 21164 (nor even the 21264, that melted its VRM’s) and hppa (& the powermac g5 has a place) – only problem is, power cost to use them for anything, now is terrifying – and one of them had beene my top seti@home unit of the time; guess which.
CDE, I miss thee – and, thinking – even gnome of the era, climbed higher up the tree.
The only practical use of a PowerMac G5 is as a space heater.
They also make nice benches
My Multia is in storage now after spending many years as a gateway/server, but in the early 2000s I tried out Windows NT 4 on it. Pretty neat, and one day I caught wind of an unreleased Windows 2000 beta for Alpha processors and actually found a .ISO download link. Downloaded it, burned it, and after much finagling with ARC, got it booted up. And there it was: Windows 2000 in all its glory.
It worked very, very well, and really gives a sense of what Microsoft was trying to achieve with the NT4/2000 OSes. If I ever get a change to pull it our of storage I’ll have to do a writeup.
I’ve got an Alphastation 500/500 that has OpenVMS and NT4 dual booting. It’s pretty sweet and I picked it up for about $10 from a surplus depot.
It was originally headless and I found a PCI S3 video card that worked. I haven’t tried to actually run anything on the NT side yet, but now I’m inspired to try.
I noticed that the author has a vaxstation 4000 too. I’ve got a Vaxstation 3K that I managed to get running using an old IBM SCSI cdrom drive. The vaxstations don’t mind non-dec SCSI, but they have a bios limitation that prevents them from booting from >1GB drives.
Several years ago I bought a used pmax DECstation. I got NetBSD or OpenBSD running on it and it looks like the Net port is still active. It’s cool that they got NT running on a Multia but it’s a dead OS and in my opinion less useful for that reason. Either way, there are several good hardware troubleshooting tips over on the http://www.netbsd.org/ports/alpha/multiafaq.html“>NetBSD/alpha .
I note that while the collection is increasing, the owner seems not to have looked for peripherals. ADB or Sun keyboards and mice, for example, can be had fairly cheaply.
I really enjoyed the article and other stuff at the linked website. Would love to see more content like this on OSNews.