Nearly quarter of a century after it wasn’t released, Windows 2000 for DEC Alpha found on a discarded disk
A test 64-bit build of Windows 2000 Professional for the DEC Alpha processor has been rediscovered – shortly after the discovery of a C compiler that could generate binaries for it.
Earlier this month, intrepid code archaeologists rediscovered a C compiler, based on DEC’s C compiler for Alpha from the 1990s, that could generate 64-bit “Win64” binaries for 64-bit Windows on Alpha. Although this was an interesting find, it was just a curiosity, because there was no known 64-bit Alpha version of Windows. Somebody somewhere had their memory jogged by this, and now that too has turned up.
This is interesting because it pushes the history of 64-bit Windows back a couple of years, and it’s a product that, as The Reg reported way back in 1999, Microsoft denied would ever exist.
The build’s existence has been known about for years, ever since celebrated Microsoft blogger Raymond “Old New Thing” Chen mentioned it in TechNet magazine in 2016. The fun part is that a copy has been discovered, shared online, and even installed and, via some inspired hackery, got running just this week.
The first desktop version of Windows to officially support 64-bit processors out of the box was Windows Vista in 2006.
