[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?