Rarest, strangest, form of Windows saved techie from moment of security madness
Who, Me? It's Monday once again, dear reader, and you know what that means: another dive into the Who, Me? confessional, to share stories of IT gone wrong that Reg readers managed to pretend had gone right.
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Declan" who describes himself as "a designer working with CAD to design machines" – but one with enough technical nous that he essentially taught himself how to use the software. Indeed, at his first job in the '90s he was considered the "technical guy" and the go-to for support.
The consultancy he was working for had a bunch of Windows machines, a few Unix boxes – mostly from Sun and Silicon Graphics – plus one Digital Alpha RISC machine, running the special cut of Windows NT Microsoft made for those boxes. For those who don't remember that short-lived project, it was basically Microsoft's half-hearted gesture to the idea that there were non-Intel processors in the world. Most of the work on porting NT to Alpha was done by Digital, and when that firm was bought by Compaq the dream was over.
Anyway, long story short, Windows NT ran on Alpha, but not hugely well, and there were virtually no native applications for it – almost everything ran in emulation. However at the time the 500MHz Alpha was sufficiently speedy that performance was adequate. That was the machine Declan used.
