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.
