The collected works of neozeed - Page 1

Wow, other NT users on the Alpha.... I hope I don't get in trouble for bumping an old thread, but I've manage to collect a few updates for the Alpha NT stuff (and MIPS/PPC as well). Right now I'm keeping my Alpha stuff here:

http://vpsland.superglobalmegacorp.com/ ... 4.0-Alpha/

I have a PC164LX running terminal server... and it was a major mission to hunt down a working copy of service pack 5 & IE5...

Sorry I don't have tooooo much exciting stuff... the big thing (well for me) was the terminal server patch... you'd be amazed and annoyed to realize that just about every copy of it out there is broken.

That being said, me & a friend went 50/50 on an Alphaserver 800.... I'm installing Terminal server onto it now...!

I have VC 4 for the Alpha and yeah, it's *TERRIBLE*... Oddly enough it works great on the MIPS. Go figure. But VC6 on the Alpha is when they finally got it right.

Take something simple like unzip, and the C compiler on the NT 3.5 SDK (vc2?) couldn't compile it unless you flagged it /OD (disable optimizations), neither could VC 4.. I'd suspect VC5 was in the same territory, but VC6 works great! Heck even F2C and Dungeon compile great!

Not to mention compared to a Pentium Pro 200 (something comparable for the time) quake1 simply flies on the Alpha..

I know I'm in the minority, but to me True64 just feels like yet another unix... Nothing all *that* exciting.... but I'm sure I'm missing something, I have a media kit for the thing, but no great sales pitch into tru64.

I've watched some of their 'best' fly out to try to "fix" DCOM... oh the horrors.. The best they could come up with, eventually became that craptastic load balancer.... There is no denying some of the weird things MS does, or hearing about some of the insane 'fixes' they put into windows when the answer should have been to break bad applications, or demand patches.

I wonder if it would have changed with they were more open in licensing the code, like AT&T..?

But with that said, I have to say that as much as I hated SYSV, OpenSolaris feels really nice!

Well.. The newest version of Qemu (12.2.3) can run the Windows NT versions for the MIPS on.. Windows.. And the older 0.90 could run Windows x64 on a win32 machine!

One can only speculate if the alpha or powerpc emulation for Qemu will mature to the point of running more versions of Windows NT....

Well... I would give Qemu a shot.... I mean if it can run ARC & NT ...

Check here for some information:
http://virtuallyfun.blogspot.com/2009/0 ... -past.html

And the latest Qemu binaries for win32:
http://vpsland.superglobalmegacorp.com/ ... 0.12.3.zip

I don't have MIPS OS... so I can't test much else.... But go ahead & give it a shot.

With a C compiler it's usable... kind of like any other old machine....
I've managed to find Visual C++ 2.0 & 4.0 for the MIPS... and the NT 3.1 SDK had the cli version of the tools for what would have been VC 1.0...

There is a port of gcc to the Dec Alpha, so if you don't have the MS tools you can at least run that.

I've managed to build...
f2c (the fortran 2 C translator)
dungeon 2.56 (the portable fortran version converted into C, then built natively)
Quake 1
Neko
0irc
Nethack .....

I guess it comes down to what ever you can find source for, lots of things will just compile.. minivmac doesn't run on the MIPS but it runs on the Alpha... go figure. It's like running some ancient Unix..

I remember back in the late 1990's in the call centers there was some call routing software that only ran on Dec Alphas..... And I can tell you at this call center we had some super ANCIENT servers... 32 way 486's running NCR Unix... ugh.

It's been years so I don't quite remember the name of the product, but the call center world runs on the Avaya/Lucent platform that has it's own call routing solution which naturally is completely incompatible with the other one requiring alpha's.

So much like the NCR unix stuff, these things find their ways into companies because that is what the developers knew how to code with 'quickly' and they wind up in production.... Much like the next we had hiding in the back doing something....

I wish I could remember it's name, but it's been nearly a decade!

We did have 3b2's at college and I think I missed the wave of those things being replaced.... But I did just remember that the giant NCR's were on FDDI.... It's been the only time I've ever seen that stuff in the wild... Didn't the 3b2's have FDDI interlinks? I know the ones that we had were Starlan, and it was a big deal for the planetarium we retrofitted the 3b2s to as we managed to get the starlan stuff to run under Windows 95, and with a little luck with the compiler we got samba to build on the things.... Oh the horror!!!

I'm still drawing a blank on that call routing software, it was a nightmare to integrate, and of course nobody ever used it.... It was one of those CIO pet projects that not only went nowhere, but resulted in a lot of people losing their jobs.......


--edit

I just remembered the software.. Genesys call routing. It was a freaking nightmare to setup... And our 'unix' people were SUN only... when the project folded they wouldn't let me use the alphas for work stuff... hell they even insisted I use some ultrasparc server for tftpbooting routers and whatnot.... I remember I caught one guy screwing around with my stuff, so I wound up compiling SIMH on the SUN, and running NetBSD Vax on the thing.... lol.

wow, very cool! I assume you've got the update #3 for the RISCs installed for NS 3.3? I don't know if there was a RISC compiled version of Doom for NS... the version I have is m68k/i486....

One day I've got to spend some 'quality' time with NS 3.3 and port some fun games....

FWIW Virtual PC 2007 (6.0.192.0) can run AIX 1.3 again!... however you'll be plagued by constant hdr0 interrupt issues....

I guess I should just 'push thru' the install glitches backing up the vhd as I go...

At any rate I've also managed to get some SLIP routing with NT 4.0 .... Yeah I know it's crazy sounding, but it's a cheap router for the virtual world!

The 'big' thing fixpack 3 has is all the y2k updates...

I've only installed NS once on my m68k and it's been going fine for years, I've installed it on the x86 stuff a billion times (well ok maybe a few hundred over the years) and I don't recall it being unstable or with any 'major' issues or anything...

I thought you'd get a kick out of this...

http://tyom.blogspot.com/2009/12/solari ... ow-to.html

Although it seems to work for older 2.4-2.6 releases....

I'd say the big delay to market kind of killed the Itanium before it was even born...

Maybe it's me but I have always thought it was the #1 reason that SGI got tripped up, cutting off it's MIPS stuff, and getting ready for the switch to Itanium, to only find out that it wasn't ready, and then it wouldn't be ready for YEARS while they had to scramble to try to keep the company afloat with some kind of faster MIPS.

On the Windows front, we always kept on hearing more and more about how great this 64bit computing would be, but again such massive delays just made it all feel like another vapor ware special from MS & Intel.

Not to mention when the Merced finally came out they were next to impossible to get, and we as customers were told to sit this round out as they frankly were not ready for production. Heck even the first version of Windows 2000 for the Itanium was lovingly called "Windows 2000 Advanced Server Limited Edition" which may sound great if you want to build an exclusive clubhouse, but it just said to us that this thing was more of a proof of concept then a real shipping product.

And then of course in 2003 the x64 stuff launched. It was really cool for Linux & BSD users as we suddenly moved all of our firewalls and internal stuff to the x64 and it was great. The custom in house stuff we did we luckily still have the source to, so we re-built and away we went. The big 'deal' was price, and part availability. And with the AMD stuff we really felt like that we had the ultimate path forwards & backwards. If we needed to run something old on any new machine we got, we could. Hell we can even run our MS-DOS product natively and all is well.

There is a lot to be said for hardware level comparability.

The whole time though we had kept on hearing from our tech contacts at Microsoft that they had a x64 version of Windows "in the wings" and they were just waiting for the right moment to release the product. The basic impression we had gotten from them was that if you didn't barge into the itanium market around 2001-2002 that you would be better off waiting for the x64 as they were already getting ready to scale back and drop the Itanium... Which is pretty evident in that windows 2003 was a 'full' release while the 2008 version is pretty scaled back. Hell you can't even have an Itanium dhcp server or active directory server. They clearly were phasing the product out. This is not even counting how they killed the workstation versions.

Which I guess now is no big surprise, esp once Windows on the x64 shipped, the Itanium version was dead.

It's just like how the MIPS/PPC/Alpha versions of Windows NT all died. Just show someone a RISC version of Windows, and the first thing they notice is that it looks *JUST LIKE THE i386*... But the hardware will cost a lot more. And they can do the exact thing. And that native applications are pretty dammed hard to get.

I mean even the whole 'native application' thing is moot for the Itanium as MS FINALLY SAW THE LIGHT OF CROSS COMPILERS... Mostly because they knew most devs would never buy Itaniums. But even that couldn't save the platform.

Instead it's always been, unless you need xyz app to run FASTER today, and you don't care how much it costs, because you need speed there hasn't been a compelling reason to buy a non x86 version of Windows. And the kicker is that Intel just kept on cranking out faster CPU's that you could constantly upgrade CPU's and get faster machines, as Intel had lept over the CISC performance "wall".

So I think the larger question about the Itanium's future is how much money is it making, vs how much it cost to make? I know they'll keep on making CPU's because of obligations to people that switched over to it, killing their own RISC cpu's, but eventually Intel will give up and move on. Even RedHat has given up on the Itanium.

I bet there is some pretty pissed off people at HP, as they have basically screwed themselves out of control of their own destiny... So where will they be in 5-10 years from now? Trying to fab their own Itaniums? Or porting to the x64..?

I just found out that IBM bought transitive, effectively killing that escape route. I had thought it would be kind of funny how they got all those great contracts getting people ONTO the Itanium (or apple from the PPC to the x64) but their next big thing would be getting people OFF the Itanium.

I guess someone ought to start funding Qemu.......

Ok I think that's enough rambling.

Speaking of Itaniums running Windows, does anyone have one?

I built neko & quake for it, but have no way to test it.....


http://vpsland.superglobalmegacorp.com/install/neko-ia64.zip
http://vpsland.superglobalmegacorp.com/install/ezquake.zip

That'd be cool, but I don't know if I'd kill myself to have an animated cat chase the mouse around... lol
Not to mention, now that I think about it, the market of people to play games on Itaniums is probably around 0.....

Oops it kept the permissions across the shares.... Don't you hate it when NT actually *WORKS* and you are so used to it not mattering?

lol

Anyways I fixed the link.

For the quake thing, I built it for the x86, x64, MIPS, Alpha and Ia64... They all seem to play locally fine.

If you have compilers.... check out quake... The source is out there, and it's all got bindings for OpenGL...

Could it be done..? Sure. Will it be done? Highly unlikely.

Just look at this:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/syste ... OS2toLinux

Although there is nothing stopping someone from building something like DOSCALL1.DLL, KBDCALLS.DLL, QUECALLS.DLL, SESMGR.DLL, OS2CHAR.DLL in POSIX giving some kind of layer to act like OS/2 ....

But then we run into the age old thing about there being no big apps...

And frankly Virtual PC & Qemu run OS/2 pretty darn good, why on earth would someone go through all that hell to port something to 'kind of work' when you can just emulate the whole thing?

That being said, I just scored a copy of Excel 3.0 for OS/2... It's neat, but it's not like MS is going to release the source anytime soon.... (but it was worth the $18 on ebay!)

Oh absolutely, and expect the Itanium to be pulled in 5 years or so. The volume isn't there and all those "ecc" features you want are appearing on the xenons. The writing is on the wall..(well it's been for some time now) that the x86 has basically won out.

I'm sure there are some out there somewhere.... Much like you can bet there are some mainframe people not ready to give up their SNA networks either...



Lots of people forget that Windows NT started out as NT OS/2. And they kept the 1.x personality, but threw away the "cruiser" 32bit personality and took that WILO port of Windows 3.0 to OS/2 as a starting point of porting Windows to OS/2... It's in some old book "showstopper".

I guess the question is, would you implement it on top of LIBC, or tie it to the kernel with syscalls to make it more 'native' to the kernel?

Without having the source to either, who knows... I'm just glad it's not my job.



Which is true, as long as you never programmed around that quirky OS... Just look at all the fun the Wine people have had, to the point they have to be bug for bug compatible.

Sometimes I'm surprised nobody has tried.. not everyone wants to run Unix, but ReactOS is still coming along in Alpha stages, but it's too fragile for day to day usage...

I guess the real thing is that unless you are XYZ corp with this internal app (which will never see the light of day for external testing) what great OS/2 programs are there to test with? Sure I've got Excel 3.0 for OS/2, but it's the 16bit stuff.... And OS/2 1.3 runs great in Virtual PC!

Well don't forget MS got the DEC team after DEC killed prisim/mica.. But then DEC could never sell something like NT, just look at how they mismanged the Alpha... Even the ex DEC people used to laugh that DEC could have had NT for 'free' but instead DEC went to lay them all off... Dec only ened up 'getting' NT after lawsuits saying that NT's razzle/dazzle was the whole prisim/mica thing stolen.

Compaq just had no vision, nor any care about being a chip maker, so killed the Alpha..

People used the Alpha who had lots of $$$ and needed speed *NOW*... That's one thing for sure, it never was cost effective, or for a long term buy, as intel kept on closing the gap on the Alpha CPU's by 1-2 years...

But with the Itanium, we've seen it lose linux support, and now windows.. Like the money pit that was OS/2, eventually someone at Intel is going to look at the cost of the chip, look at the revenue, and see how much it'd cost to just dump it on HP and abandon the whole thing.....

Intel always is about big volume, and the fact is the Itanium is never going to deliver there.

Yeah, it's all in this great book "showstopper" and how Dave Cutler cut a deal with MS, that not only would they take the software team, but also the hardware team... Love him or hate him, Dave stuck it out for his people....

But then, could you imagine DEC licensing it's OS to run on other CPU's and on other hardware..? that'd be madness!

Wasn't the tukwila stuff announced forever ago? I found this from the register:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/03 ... _followup/

And yet there is a bunch of posts around February this year announcing the Tukwila stuff ( http://www.communities.hp.com/online/bl ... -next.aspx ) but apparently it didn't ship then, but it will next week?

But that's been the story of the Itanium... Sometimes I wonder if it's been purposely held back to allow the xenon to catch up... Then again a chip with ~2 billion transistors is no doubt a little complicated to FAB...!

I just think that fewer supported OS's is a bad thing.... It's never good to see big vendors exit your market.... Even if it is Microsoft.... Sometimes you do need a super computer to push things like Exchange or SQL 2008 into something usable.

Open up a terminal program, and 'talk' to the GPS... IIRC it'll just spew clock timings and stuff... but as you 'move' around they should change......

And for what it's worth, every time I go to Brooklyn, my GPS tells me I'm in the middle of the Hudson river.... It's a little annoying.

I still laugh remembering that HP branded iPod.... I think it was around then, when it was painfully clear that Apple was the brand that people sought, not HP. I wonder how much HP paid Apple for that thing....

I guess it can't be any worse then that Motorola ROKR phone.

The latest source in GIT is working even better!

I used to love these things.... you could find them on ebay a few years ago for around $500 .. but the shipping would be close to 1000... But they make GREAT machines with that many cpu's... I ran Virtual Server on one, and SQL on another...

They make great machines to test parallel stuff on, but they are LOUD as hell...

These were great machines, but newstuff just needs something with more oomph then a P3... But these things kicked ass!!!!

were available?

I'm not soliciting warez etc etc, I just can't figure out what I should be searching for on google for anyone that may still be selling the stuff.... As far as I can tell the microsoft fortran was sold to compaq, who then sold it to intel but it was never available for the Alpha..?

I would imagine that DEC would have released one, as they did for their UNIX offering, but so far I haven't seen any mention of it. I've tried f2c, but there is some massive errors in the floating point, which seem to be related to DEC doing their different from the way that f2c expects... (unlike the i386/MIPS/SPARC that I've tested...).

Anyways, any pointers would be appreciated!!!!

Thanks!

I don't know if this would help anyone, but it turns out that OpenWatcom has support for the Dec Alpha... You'll have to download a version & it's source code, and start building it, but there is cross compiler support, and a native build support for C/C++ & Fortran for the Alpha...

Ok, it's only F77 but hell it's free!

I'd probably walk to city hall & take the R/W up to 57th & 7th...

I've seen one... well a dead one.

It looked just like a normal thinkpad, but it was a little thicker, it was heaver then I recall the old thinkpads being (from the 486 era), and it was a shame this one was dead.... I forget the mode, but it could run NT & AIX.... I wondered if it'd run OS/2.