
Booting Windows NT 4 on a DEC Multia - fanf2
https://blog.pizzabox.computer/posts/booting-the-multia/
======
miah_
In ~1997 I bought a Multia off some online auction site pre-Ebay. My local PC
supplier had to special order 64MB ECC RAM for me as they didn't carry it. For
a teenager at my first IT job it took me a few months to afford the RAM and
was a bit before I had it running. I mainly used it beta testing Redhat
Rawhide and experimenting with Linux. It was my first non-x86 system.

I did try WindowsNT 4.0 on it for a week, but it was slow and almost nothing
was compatible with it.

Later I got some Alphastations but they were almost the same spec as a Multia,
just better form factor.

My main PC around this time was a Sun Sparcstation 20 with a ROSS Dual
Hypersparc module and 2GB RAM. I remember paying around $2000 for it in 1998,
probably too much! Unfortunately the magic smoke escaped from the CPU one
morning in 2000 :(

~~~
projektfu
Not bad for the SPARC considering it was introduced at around $25,000. Of
course, by 1998 it was only as powerful as a dual processor Pentium Pro. I
think the RAM maxed out at 512MB though.

~~~
jibanes
I did my thesis (and wrote code on) a sparcstation lx running an (very) early
version of openbsd/sparc.

~~~
projektfu
I'd often sit down and write papers at a SPARC IPX in the computer lab because
nobody else knew what they were doing. It was a pretty slow computer, but the
windows PCs were all on Win 3.1 at the time and that was pretty annoying. You
had to boot the PC from scratch each time, while the IPX was ready to go.
Anyone else remember Pitt's computing evironment around 1996?

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13of40
"My understanding of this procedure is that I would mount the hard drive on
another computer and match the Administrator password hash to a known
password"

For future reference, all you need to do is temporarily replace services.exe
with an exe that runs "net user administrator xyz123" (to change the password
to xyz123), then reboot. Then put the original services.exe back, of course.

~~~
mschuster91
... which would require getting your hands on a toolchain able to compile for
this decades-old Windows on a pretty rare architecture.

~~~
13of40
Not really. This is pre-ASLR, so all you need to do is push a string pointer
on the stack and call an address. Probably less than 15 bytes of machine code
you'd need to hex-edit into an existing exe.

~~~
Neil44
If you have hard drive access you can replace the logon.scr screensaver
executable with the command prompt executable, then a few minutes after boot
up a command prompt with system privileges will appear by magic.

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Maarten88
NT 4 prepared Win32 for synchronization with Windows 95. I hated it for that:
they moved the presentation layer into the kernel (to allow features like
"Active Desktop" widgets) which negatively impacted reliability and security
for years to come.

Windows NT 3.1 and 3.5 were much more reliable. The CD-ROM's containing the OS
from MSDN came with the Microsoft C/C++ compiler on it, somewhere they even
added Visual Studio 1.0.

There was hardly any client software for MIPS and Alpha, but the i386 versions
ran 16 bit versions of Ami Pro, Excel and Mosaic well. Which is probably why
MIPS and Alpha NT versions never became popular, despite the fact that they
were very fast for the time.

~~~
flomo
NT 3.x was mainly pushed as a server OS targeting Novell Netware. On the PC
side it never made sense unless you bought one of these discount surplus
Multias.

I worked at a F500 and two times DEC reps came into sell NT/Alpha, and both
occasions, they couldn't get the machines to boot. I wonder how much of that
NT/Alpha just for marketing, because DEC was selling a lot of x86 servers in
those days.

The Pentium Pro 200Mhz was better than or close-enough to RISC processors in
most standard benchmarks that most businesses seem to decide "good enough",
and that was the beginning of the end of the end of the server processor wars.

~~~
fanf2
I had a pet Pentium Pro server in about 1999, and it was a fantastic machine.
Excellent CPU performance and a fast IO system to match.

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Jaruzel
> _Finding software written for Win32 /Alpha, though, is likely to be a
> challenge._

As someone who actually had one of these at work[1] back in the early 90s,
there was hardly any software compiled for Alpha even when it was a current
product. Lack of software support, was one of the reasons that WinNT Alpha
never gained a foothold. Which was a shame as the Alpha hardware was pretty
great.

\--

[1] It was the only one we had, I think we got it as a freebie as the rest of
the computer room was choca full of DEC VAXs.

~~~
gaius
_there was hardly any software compiled for Alpha even when it was a current
product_

I ran SQL Server on NT on Alpha in the 90s, it was actually very good, but you
had to treat it as a dedicated appliance rather than a general-purpose
computer because as you say, there was very little software available.

Then the industry took a weird meander through DEC StrongARM and now Microsoft
is looking at Windows on ARM seriously again...

------
walrus01
I remember seeing NT3.5 running on an Alpha at a trade show around the same
time period. A higher end model than the one the author posts here. The reason
why it never found "consumer success" is that in late 1993 dollars it cost
$7800 , equivalent to about $13,600 today. When at the same time it was
possible to buy a 486DX/33 for just under $2000 in a pretty decent, though not
nearly as capable configuration. That is what consumers could afford.

------
djsumdog
I remember playing with a MSDN copy of Win NT 3.51 in my cousin's cubical back
at AMI in the late 90s. We had NT4 on a Pentium Pro I got to admin back in
high school. I even tried to see if I could get the library computers to login
off a Samba PDC instead of the NT4 Server. A lot of stuff didn't work, and
group policies were pretty janky.

I like how the author also has an SGI and two Sun machines next to this one.
We got a hold of some old Sun Stations in University back in 2001; paid like
$12 for a crate of them. They were made in the 80s and had dual 100MB SCSI
hard drives, tons of ram slots (I want to say 32 or 64MB of potential ram),
and those crazy optical mice that needed the grid based mouse pads. I think I
got RedHat running on mine and didn't do much with it.

I'd love to collect and work on old stuff like this, but I started to do some
hard core backpacking in my 30s and my parents threw out nearly everything
while I was over seas for a few years. I'd really like to stay minimal with a
room full or less of stuff, so I don't see myself getting into old computing
any time soon. I'll just read posts like this and read The 8-Bit guy to get
that nostalgia fix.

Oh and if you're ever in Seattle and love old machines, check out The Living
Computer Museum. They have actual Altos, HP UX, TIs, Apples, and DEC Alpha
machines you can log into and play with. It's pretty amazing.

~~~
lukeh
Group policies were introduced with Windows 2000 and Active Directory.

~~~
djsumdog
Sorry, I meant System Policies, the predecessors to Group Policies.

------
mkesper
The article mentions Service Pack 6. You needed to install 6a which fixed up
many faults of 6, like e.g. not being able to disable Nagle's algorithm for
TCP (not funny when you wanted to send around short TCP messages).

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jdwithit
As a kid who grew up in Massachusetts in the 80s and 90s, I'd love to go back
in time and experience the competing tech that was being built in my back yard
before the west coast totally won out. I had friends whose parents worked for
both DEC and Wang Laboratories, and had those companies' gear in their homes.
At the time I only cared about what games you could put on or write for them,
but it would be awesome to poke around on them again as an adult.

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hestefisk
This brings back so many fond memories from the late 90ies. I dual booted
Windows NT 4 and Red Hat Linux for many years on an old Pentium 166 with an
Adaptec scsi controller (remember that?). It was wonderful. Could never afford
an Alpha machine though. WinNT was good stuff, miss the good old blue boot
screen.

~~~
Fnoord
Yeah I remember having a server with an Adaptec SCSI controller. It only
booted with Linux 2.4. When we attempted to boot Linux 2.6 I had to drive 300
km to the datacenter to fix it. "trying harder", it printed. Fun stuff.

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mrbill
I ran NT4 on a MIPS Magnum R4000 for a while. It worked okay. Could run 16bit
x86 Windows/DOS stuff in a weird sort of translation/emulation.

All my Multias (I owned 2-3 over the years) usually ended up with RHEL on
them; nobody in the nerd crowd I was in wanted to run Windows on them. They
ran so hot that if you sat it horizontal it would keep your coffee cup warm if
close enough.

I believe someone got VMS running on one after some hackery with the
firmware/BIOS.

~~~
michrassena
I bought an Acer PICA
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acer_PICA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acer_PICA))
back in the early 2000s, obsolete by then, just to play with it and Windows NT
4. MIPS still seemed exotic, and there was little free software to use on the
platform. I think a port of Office existed, and maybe an early Internet
Explorer.

I'm not sure what the point of the ARC ports of NT even were, except
Microsoft's attempt to keep its fingers in as many pies as possible and crowd
out competitors.

~~~
mrbill
They weren't sure if x86 was going to be competitive in the long run at that
point, so they were porting to all the major architectures. I even heard
rumors of a SPARC port of NT 3.51 but I've never seen it in the flesh.

Solaris even ported to PPC (specific RS6K boxes) for Solaris 2.5.1; I've got a
copy of that ISO image around somewhere but never had the right hardware to
run it.

------
ecopoesis
I had an Alpha Multia back in ‘98. I remember having to scour eBay for the
appropriate SCSI adapters since DEC used something proprietary. And even with
the adapter, I never got the Linuxes of the time to recognize the HDs.

The key to running NT4 for Alpha was DEC’s FX!32. It crosscompiled x86 code to
AXP. Thanks to Alpha’s better design this made my 233mhz 21066 a lot faster
running x86 code the my Pentium MMX 233.

------
ben1040
I realized the only other time I'd heard of the Multia was from Slashdot posts
from nearly 20 years ago.

[https://tech.slashdot.org/story/99/08/02/0219235/free-
multia...](https://tech.slashdot.org/story/99/08/02/0219235/free-multias-pay-
shipping-only)

~~~
dmeeker
PSA: don't click the link to the linux store in the Slashdot article. Someone
super dodgy owns that domain name now.

------
drewg123
I had an alpha (miata, AKA Personal Workstation 500au, I think) running NT on
my desk for a while, while we waited for space to open up in a rack..(1) The
NT on it seemed quite usable, thanks to the FX!32 emulator. When running x86
compiled stuff, it felt mostly as fast as contemporary high-end PCs, once
you'd opened the x86 program and used it for a while.

(1) We used FreeBSD/alpha, so we always bought the "NT" version of machines to
save $$$ on the DEC UNIX license fee. Eg, just like today, the Windows version
of a machine was cheaper.. FreeBSD did not support the ARC firmware needed by
NT, but you could easily switch the machines to SRM in order to load FreeBSD.

------
randomerr
I miss the simplicity of the NT / 2003 era of servers. You could make setup as
simple or as complex as you now. Now you have to have a BSA to configure so
many arbitrary standards just to connect to a NAS.

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maxerickson
I knew someone who had a DEC running Windows NT around 2000. They admitted it
didn't work as well as they would have liked.

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aap_
I have Windows 2000 RC2 running on an Alpha :) It's really neat, you can even
execute x86 programs.

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paulirwin
So at the time, to compile software for Windows NT Alpha, was there an Alpha
IDE and compiler available (something like VC++) such that developers were
writing and debugging locally, or would developers usually cross-compile from
an x86 machine?

~~~
paulirwin
To answer my own question, now that I'm not on my mobile: it looks like there
was an Alpha version of Visual C++ 2.0, as well as a cross-compiler for the
68k Macintosh! [1] I was firmly in VB land at the time (as a ~10 year old) so
this bit of history eluded me.

[1]
[https://accu.org/index.php/journals/1771](https://accu.org/index.php/journals/1771)

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other_herbert
I messed around with one of these I got in college at an off lease / salvage
type place... The boot loader on those was really cool and because it was an
alpha, you had a license for digital UNIX...

