[sgt_barnes]

Hey everybody,

to counter the calm in the DEC forum (and strangely, on irixnet.org, in general), I decided to put up a personal devlog.

The machine that is most entertaining to me currently is my SX164, running Windows NT 4. So this devlog will center on this platform.

The prime focus will be how it was to program on those machines, deep within the Microsoft ecosystem of the late nineties. What tools and technologies where available on them?

And I hope to explore the depths of the Alpha ISA, its microarchitecture, and how NT ran on top of all of that. And hopefully we'll get some deeper insight into the performance of these machines, compared to its contemporaries. I sure have a bunch of Intel P6 slot CPU's lying round, that seem perfectly suited for that task...

Of course, I have a lots of toy projects lying round, and I will eventually reach most of them here.

To name a few:

* an editor
* a webserver
* a source control system

Some, like the editor and SCS are programmed around critical shortcomings of Windows NT, especially on exotic platforms like Alpha. After all, one simply cannot accomplish anything useful with that old notepad, and once you're addicted to git, Visual Source Safe is just not going to cut it.

Others, like the webserver, are purely educational. If you want to know how that stuff really works, you best write one yourself.

Yeah, I know what you are thinking, and you are probably right: I suffer from a really bad case of "not invented here syndrome". But hey, I'm a programmer, so what else could I probably do with such a machine? And I assure you that I will nevertheless port lots of other people's useful stuff to that box. Part of that coming from the realization that even I can't write everything from scratch, yeah, shoulders of giants, an' stuff...

I hope to provide packages for most of it, so other people still sitting in the same boat with me will also benefit.

And shit I for some reason cannot compile, or get mad at in the process, or loose interest in, I will gladly defer to the technological marvel that is FX!32, or scrape it off some old MSDN or Resource Kit CDs. Like GNU Diff tools I use for the scs, or the NTP service. I'll happily share my findings in that regard, also.

All in all, I want to prove that even more than two decades after it's demise, one can still put those dream machines from the late nineties to good and productive use today. If nothing else, that is justification enough, on a forum like this, isn't it?

[Raion]

It's "calm" here because everyone's worried about COVID-19. I myself haven't had time to do any dev work or anything on my SGIs because there's been people casing my house every so often, so I've gotten very little sleep. Break-ins have skyrocketed in my area.

[sgt_barnes]

Woha, that's bad news! There always seem to be people that take advantage of any crisis, no matter how severe that crisis may be. And they make life for everybody so much more miserable.

Stay safe, you all!

[jan-jaap]

The prime focus will be how it was to program on those machines, deep within the Microsoft ecosystem of the late nineties. What tools and technologies where available on them?

[...]

And shit I for some reason cannot compile, or get mad at in the process, or loose interest in, I will gladly defer to the technological marvel that is FX!32, or scrape it off some old MSDN or Resource Kit CDs. Like GNU Diff tools I use for the scs, or the NTP service. I'll happily share my findings in that regard, also.

All in all, I want to prove that even more than two decades after it's demise, one can still put those dream machines from the late nineties to good and productive use today. If nothing else, that is justification enough, on a forum like this, isn't it?

Ah, the Alphas ... fond memories. I used to run my firewall on an AXPpci33 for many many years, I think initially because it was my only system that could route the 100Mb/s campus network at full speed. Yeah I'm that old Of course it was still in use years later despite running Linux <version ancient> / Apache <old>. Was fun watching the message log, apache-cgi: I don't understand this URL <bunch of x86 opcodes>. I also had a Digital Personal Workstation 433. Everything went to a Nekochan member a couple years ago.

We still have MSDN archives at work from circa the Windows95 days until when they stopped shipping DVDs, if ever. I guess you have the infamous Windows 2000 AXP betas, they're in there somewhere. Of course I'm not really supposed to be in the office these days...

GIT is plain C code, isn't it? Surely that should be doable?

It's "calm" here because everyone's worried about COVID-19. I myself haven't had time to do any dev work or anything on my SGIs because there's been people casing my house every so often, so I've gotten very little sleep. Break-ins have skyrocketed in my area.

I can't speak for others, but the combination of a full time job (by VPN) and home-schooling two kids makes for long days. Plus, to go back to my office in the evening to mess with my SGIs after spending the whole day working there already? Meh.

Over here 'traditional' crime seems to be down. Hard to pickpocket the few remaining people on the streets from 1.5m distance, or burglar a house when everybody is at home. Of course we have online fraudsters selling non-existing masks etc.

[sgt_barnes]

We still have MSDN archives at work from circa the Windows95 days until when they stopped shipping DVDs, if ever. I guess you have the infamous Windows 2000 AXP betas, they're in there somewhere. Of course I'm not really supposed to be in the office these days...

I also have taken care of most of the MSDN stuff, when the boss threw it out when our office moved ~2011. And I think I found a Win2000 beta iso in some abandonware place. But we should really compare what we have and make sure everybody has access to it when live resumes after corona.

GIT is plain C code, isn't it? Surely that should be doable?

Compiling that on a Windows version released ten years prior to the first appearence of git on Linux does not bode well on that. You'd probably have to start with porting the GNU toolchain to that system, and then still fix a lot of stuff because NT4 misses some features (IPV6 comes to mind here).

I had good results with Perl (5.6.2), and on top of that with OpenSSL (1.0.2u), but they both supported VC6 out of the box, more or less. I will give OpenSSL 1.1.1f a try over the weekend, would be cool to have the webserver serve its static pages with TLS 1.3... 

Over here 'traditional' crime seems to be down. Hard to pickpocket the few remaining people on the streets from 1.5m distance, or burglar a house when everybody is at home. Of course we have online fraudsters selling non-existing masks etc.

Pretty much the same here. Plus, I guess the long-standing german tradition of instantly reporting every suspicios person didn't help those burglars, either. Normally I despise of this "block warden" behaviour, but I think in times like these it comes in handy. :-/

[lunatic]

I think I have seen a very old version of cygwin for NT/Alpha many years ago. This might still help you.

[sgt_barnes]

Thank's, lunatic! That may help, indeed...

You don't happen to have a link for that lying around?

[lunatic]

I have a bunch of files archived that came from some ftp servers...
Apparently I've got a full mirror of what used to be ftp.alphant.com. I have only barely looked at those files and I have no real idea if this works. I can put everything in a .ZIP, but don't hold me accountable for what's in there, because I don't have time to check all those files. I just copied them from an archive some years ago. It's around 2GB.

[Irinikus]

I downloaded that entire FTP and have it on my Mac. (It's 3.87GB)

[sgt_barnes]

I have also some 1.5GB of ft.alphant.com, but unfortunately, there is no cygwin...

@Irinikus: Would you mind uploading that somewhere?