Reading that gave me flashbacks to a much earlier era in my career. There but the grace of goes I!

The contrarian in me would probably say that the rarest form of Windows was probably Windows NT on MIPS, a thing that I have yet to see but I believe was a possibility.

And of course these was NT on PowerPC, although that I have seen if not used in either jest or anger.

And there I was thinking that the rarest form of Windows ..... was one that worked reliably!

We had a couple of the [1]SGI MIPS Windows workstations when I was doing IT support for a Uni department. I didn't do much on them, but I recall they weren't particularly reliable, even worse than regular Windows NT; given their peculiarities and rarity, they probably didn't get much attention from MS for patches & support. I don't believe they got much usage either, they'd been bought to do some kind of 3D stuff for someone's PhD IIRC, but didn't work that well for the job.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Visual_Workstation

Declan's lucky day was because Borkzilla couldn't be arsed to do a proper CPU version, and couldn't be arsed to make emulation work properly either.

So, a sigh of relief, a restart of the VMs (or similar) and the problem is over.

One of the rare cases where Redmond incompetence saved the day.

I guess Declan could be considered an Alpha male...

... to run Windows NT on it.

By about the mid 1990s, there were four main OSes available for the Alpha: DEC’s own OpenVMS and “OSF/1” (later to be renamed “Tru64”) Unix, Mirosoft’s Windows NT, and this newfangled “Linux” thing.

Remember, the Alpha was a full 64-bit architecture, back when that was still a novelty. Both Unix and Linux were full 64-bit. VMS on Alpha was a hybrid 32/64-bit OS. While Windows NT ran strictly in 32-bit “TASO” mode (“Truncated Address Space Option”), pretending that the top 32 bits of each address simply didn’t exist.

See what I mean about a waste?

We had an early Alpha at Uni. It was screamingly fast compared to the Vaxen and Suns that were the mainstay of University IT. Such a shame HP killed Alpha to save Itanic.

My first Unix was OSF1 on DEC Alphas at university, first out of curiosity and then because you could always get on them (unlike the Windows 3.11 / NT4 machines).

I had one of the small Alphas to play with for a while. I put Linux on it and it was a lovely machine - much better than the pizza-box Sparcstation which was my main machine. Because of its power I was able to run some FORTRAN antenna modelling software on it that produced answers in a reasonable time.

It's sad that its life was cut so short by DEC's troubles. I really thought that it was a major step forward in computer architectures at the time. I still have a copy of "Alpha Implementation & Architecture" though it's now a sad reminder of what might have been.

Dec lan is a fantastic bit of Regonimisation for a story involving an Alpha

See icon as it's almost time

IIRC, the CAD program was SolidWorks & had an integrated FEA package, CosmosWorks. Analysis on DEC Alpha was, according to users, an order of magnitude faster but DEC stood still & watched while Intel crept past them.

I had forgotten this byway of IT history

Back in the late 90s we had quite a bit of DEC Alpha hardware (being 64 bit) running DEC OSF/1 (ultimately became Tru64) - mostly low end servers but a few Alphastations (200,400,500) - one model of which would habitually boot into ARC or Alphabios (definitely not SRM) so did not boot into the installed DEC Unix.

When I had one of these on my desk to upgrade to 4.0G my curiosity got the better of my judgement and I tried to install the Alpha version of Windows 2000 - I have no idea why we had a copy of the install media* but there were crates of media for the menagerie of Sun, SGI, IBM, HP servers and workstations etc...

In any case the install went as smoothly as on a PC. At the time it seemed to me from the informational messages that the Alphabios was also emulating an x86. Once installed I had a fiddle for a few days and appeared quite fast compared to the standard windows desktops the polloi were using.

Quick install and configuration of DEC Unix and returned to the owner.

Back to reality but probably not to normality. :)

* The standard NT4 install media had non x86 architectures (eg MIPS risc) but I don't recall whether the Alpha was one.

I have once been saved from an infinite loop sending emails because Azure Information Protection (a plugin that lets you mark office docs "Confidential", "Top Secret" or whatever) didn't let Excel VBA set the status on Outlook mailitems, so there was an error to click-through before the code could progress.

It should have! It worked with all other Office format documents I tried, but not emails. And while it did save me some bother with that email loop, I did still have to work out a fix. The fix was to create a new excel workbook, mark *that* Confidential, attach it to the draft email, wait a split second for AIP to automatically grade the email Confidential (because it inherited the sensitivity from the highest of it's attachment's), then remove the template, boom, email is marked Confidential and will send without further complaint.

About four years later (that'd be now), Microsoft finally integrated the feature properly. I only last week got done stripping out that dodgy workaround!

I was working at the Centre for High Performance Computing of our university at the time, on an RS6000 running AIX, from which I could access the Cray J932, when several infected emails were received. On this and other UNIX boxes the payload was totally harmless. Windows users were less lucky. We all received an apology from the system administrators that, alas, automation of tasks was not as "advanced" on UNIX machines as on Windows, so to experience the true joy of the "I love you" virus, please randomly delete some important files on your system, and send the mail to a random selection of people in your inbox (manually, of course). They ended with a repeat of the apology for the inconvenience.

It's nice to have sysadmins who are competent and come fully equipped with a sense of humour.

And there was the story of the tech support who didn't open it because NOBODY tells tech support "I love you".