[rescue] DECstation 5000

[Chris Petersen]

On Mon, Jul 15, 2002 at 07:16:27PM -0400, Dave McGuire wrote:
> On July 15, Eric Dittman wrote:
> > >   Well, NT was developed on those machines, if memory serves.  But
> > > we'll hunt you down and kill you if you so much as express interest in
> > > running NT on that machine.
> > 
> > I checked, and DEC did an experimental version of NT for the
> > R3000, but it was dropped before NT 3.1 was released.  I found
> > another old post that said Microsoft never developed support
> > for TurboChannel systems.
> > 
> > I suppose I could pull out an old copy of the NT 3.1 installation
> > CD and look, but I wouldn't want to be responsible for anyone
> > installing NT on a DECstation if it is supported.
> 
>   I didn't say it was *supported*, I said it was developed there.  I may
> have overstated that fact, in that I don't believe *all* early NT
> development took place on those machines, but *some* very early NT
> development did indeed take place on DS5000s.  I saw a very early
> release of NT running on a DS5000 at a DEC facility in Delaware many
> years ago.
> 
>   I went straight home and took a shower, because it gave me that "not
> so fresh" feeling.
> 
>         -Dave
> 

Yep, once again Dave puts it succinctly...Someone told me once that this was
half the reason that they actually released the WinNT MIPS variant.  

Actually, for the Alpha crowd, much of the OSF/1 work was done on
DECstations as well.  This was the OSF/1 research work, pre-Alpha, that was
*supposed* to be the common core for a new generation of Unix...Boy did that
fall flat.

An...acquaintance...um...had the source for OSF/1 1.3 and 3.0.  As late as
3.0 there were still libraries for the MIPS environment, although I never
knew anyone to claim to have it running on DS5000s.  I swear, though, that I
remember running across 1.0 being available for DS5000s in one of the old
DEC catalogs I had around.  I'll have to go looking again sometime.

Of course, part of the reason for MIPS support in OSF/1 was also for support
of the TurboChannel bus.  IIRC, the TC bus actually ran in a MIPS mode
through an emulator in the PAL code...Weird...

Chris

-- 
Chris Petersen			  E-mail: havoc at apk.net
Systems Engineer, ExperTeam Services, EDS PLM Solutions