[geeks] Microsoft Surface...

[Phil Stracchino]

Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
> On Tue, 5 Jun 2007, Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:
>> Windows/NT was first developed for a different platform than the PC, it's
>> been discussed here before (was it MIPS?). There was also NT for MIPS,
>> SPARC and Alpha, but no one bought it and it disappeared quickly.
> 
> Originally, it was to run on some nebulous platform based around the
> i860.

I still think it's a terrible shame the i860 machine didn't make it to
the marketplace.  For its day, the i860 was a monster, and it would have
broken the stranglehold of the legacy x86 PC architecture that we still
haven't managed to break free of to this day.

iirc, there are SCSI RAID cards today that still use i860s.

> Once upon a time, NT ran a -lot- better on RISC hardware than it did on
> Intel hardware.  As of Beta 2 of Windows 2000, that's still largely the
> case.  NT 4 on a 266MHz Alpha w/ 256MB memory just -flies-.  A PC of the
> same vintage (and, really, anything up to a mid-range Pentium-II) feels
> really sluggish by comparison.
> 
> What always confused me was that the Alpha, as far as I know, doesn't
> -have- a 32-bit mode, yet Windows was a 32-bit OS.  The shift to Win64
> was a monumental undertaking, just making the code 64-bit clean.  How
> the hell did they get it to run on the Alpha, anyhow?  Did they just
> have the compiler ensure that the upper half of each register was
> all-zero (or all-one, depending on sign)?

I also lament the death of Digital and, with it, the Alpha.  Around
about 1997-1998, I *so* wanted an AXP21364 machine.

The saving grace is that much of the design expertise that went into the
Alpha actually ended up at AMD.


-- 
 It's not the years, it's the mileage.
 Phil Stracchino              phil.stracchino at speakeasy.net
 Renaissance Man, Unix generalist, Perl hacker, Free Stater
 Landline: 603-429-0220                Mobile: 603-320-5438