Windows 2000 64 бит

A 64-bit Dec Alpha C compiler was found by Virtually Fun’s neozeed earlier this year — the software archeologist has been searching for various test builds of Microsoft Windows NT, including an «AXP64/ALPHA64 port,» deemed extra special due to it being the first 64-bit version of Windows 2000 Professional. The small discovery of this obscure compiler was celebrated, but its functionality is ultimately not all that useful — neozeed notes that the items have been sitting within 1999 vintage Windows Platform SDKs: «It turns out that the AXP64 compiler set has been hiding in plain sight for DECADES. I know that it’s so unlikely that we’d ever see any public release of a 64-bit version of Windows for the Alpha, but oddly enough the compiler, headers and libraries are all there. YES. You can make full executes for AXP64/Alpha64. Of course with no OS, so it’s not like you can run them.»

He continues: «Sadly as of today, there is no way to test. There is one surviving machine with Windows 2003 AXP64, outlined in an article by Raymond Chen. It’s a great read about how Alpha64 NT port came to be. The machine is still sitting in Microsoft Archives. Hopefully one day someone can dig it out.» The story could have ended there, but a follow up post appeared on Virtually Fun earlier this week — courtesy of guest contributor Antoni Sawicki (aka tenox) who has also experimented with the cross-compiler. He provided a little bit more historical context before making an interesting announcement: «The Win64 project for AXP64 and IA64 was code named «Sundown.» Sadly, 64-bit Alpha AXP Windows was never released outside of Redmond.»

«This was released by Microsoft to allow developers test-compile their programs to see if they are «64-bit ready,» ahead of 64-bit hardware being available. However, this was just a cross-compiler and there was no actual way of running any of the binaries. Until Itanium finally came out, after infamously long delays.» He mentions that a «generous reader, who contacted neozeed after his previous post, shared a disk image… containing a 64-bit build of Windows 2000 for Alpha AXP! The reader got it from a lot of random hard disks — bought from an e-waste (seller), years ago, and completely forgot about it until they saw the blog post!» Tenox and neozeed managed to get the test build running on an old PWS500 system via very roundabout methods.

Tenox reveals a couple of limitations: «Unfortunately there are no identifying marks that would definitely prove that this is a 64-bit Alpha AXP build. The only way to tell is because there is no WOW, even for AXP32. You can’t run any 32-bit Alpha binaries. It will only run executables produced with the ALPHA64 compiler. This also means in practice, there is no native compiler for this. You have to cross compile on 32-bit NT4 or 2KRC. However if you (are) going to build anything for AXP64 I can run and test it for you. For sake of search engines the build number is 2210, the full string 2210.main.000302-1934.»

He invites folks to witness the evidence in person: «If you want to see this live in action. We (are) going to be exhibiting at VCF West 2023 in August alongside other NT RISC machines. Come and see us!»

Note: This is about the beta builds of Windows NT builds BEFORE the RTM build of Windows XP.

Windows had a rough start from 16-bit MS-DOS to 64-bit NT kernel. However, there’s an in-between phase that consists of MS-DOS based Windows versions for consumer use and NT based versions for professional use. It only took until 2001 (1999 if Neptune counts) for the home people to get NT as well, since MS-DOS is obsolete.

This page focuses on the 64-bit builds of Windows NT, which are mostly just betas of Windows 2000 and XP. Existence of Windows NT 4.0 betas is unconfirmed, while there’s obviously no confirmed 64-bit builds of Windows NT 3.xx.

Windows 2000[]

Development of an IA-64 version of Windows 2000 started at an unknown date but this version ended up being cancelled in late 1999 and development continued through Windows XP 64-Bit Edition and XP Professional x64 Edition.

Not much is known about those Win2K builds, though Build 2462 of Windows Server 2003 (known as Whistler Server at the time) had a (unused of course) login banner for a personal 64-bit edition of Windows 2000? This can be quite awkward as Windows 2000 was never planned to have a personal edition, considering Personal was the original name for home editions during Whistler development. It’s existence is currently unconfirmed, it is likely that a build for that was planned, but never made it into a real one.

Build 1877 of Windows 2000’s SDK was said to include preliminary platform SDK support for 64-bit architectures with beta compilers for IA-64 and AXP64.

Build 2019 of Windows 2000 was mentioned in the source code but unleaked.

«Whistler»[]

Those are 64-bit builds of Windows XP when it used it’s codename before the reveal of it’s final name. They can be either for the Alpha AXP64 architecture, or IA-64.

Professional/Personal[]

Build 2209[]

The hard drive where build 2210 was found and leaked actually upgraded to that build from «build 2209». This build is partially found, as the tools located in the idw directory stayed as-is and didn’t get affected by the upgrade.

Build 2210[]

This build of Windows XP was compiled in March 2nd 2000 by Microsoft, and got leaked in June 26th 2023 after a reader of Virtually Fun bought an MS employee’s hard drive, making it found and downloadable here. The surprising part of that build was that it was the only available non-server build to be available for AXP64 architectures. More info here

Build 2285[]

There was a japanese article talking about it, but netherless it’s still partially found.

Build 2296 (Itanium 64bit build)[]

A 64-bit version of Whistler’s official Beta 1 build compiled for the IA-64 architecture was supposedly available for download at the MSDN in November 3rd 2000 but it is unclear what happened next to the link. It can be considered lost.

Server[]

Build 2228[]

This tweet included screenshots of a supposedly 64-bit build of Windows 2000, though the poster said they couldn’t leak the build as well due to their hard drive getting wiped after posting the screenshots, making this build partially found.

Build 2257[]

There were both x86 and Itanium versions of this build, and both were partially found as the ISO isn’t leaked but there are screenshots.

Build 2462[]

This IA-64 build is found.

A 64-bit test 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 out there in people’s hands. Somebody somewhere had their memory jogged by this, and now that operating system 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, especially 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. However, if you were really keen, it was possible to obtain Windows XP Professional X64 Edition – in fact, based on the Windows Server 2003 codebase rather than XP per se – sometime earlier.

These, though, were aimed at 64-bit x86 computers. Before AMD’s Sledgehammer range of processors, announced in 2000 and on sale in 2003, the only official 64-bit Windows were server versions for Intel’s ill-fated Itanium processor family, which The Register was already referring to as Itanic back in 1999. A preview 64-bit version of Windows 2000 Server for Itanium was released to Technet subscribers in 2001. All the other non-Intel versions of Windows 2000 were discontinued before the product was released, although 32-bit beta versions running on Alpha, MIPS, and PowerPC had been spotted in the wild. At launch, Windows 2000 was x86-32 only.

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The new discovery reveals that there was already a 64-bit version of Windows – and a desktop edition, at that – over a year before even preview builds were officially, publicly released, which means that there’s a target for the newly uncovered compiler.

No, this isn’t of any particular use to anyone in 2023, but it’s interesting all the same. Given that the Alpha CPU shipped way back in 1992, and NT shipped with a 32-bit Alpha version the following year, it’s of note that it took so long – approaching a decade – for Win64 to become available even in test versions.

If this has made you wonder whatever became of Alpha, one eventual fallout of the 1998 Compaq/DEC acquisition, followed by the 2001 HP/Compaq acquisition, is that Intel ended up owning Alpha.

Obviously, the first pure 64-bit RISC chip couldn’t be allowed to compete with either x86 or Itanium. Nothing else could, which perhaps explains why Intel flogged its Arm line to Marvell in 2006. ®

Bootnote

All right, yes, we know: if you’re going to be pedantic, Windows 11 and everything before it are Windows NT under the hood. «Windows 2000» was just the branding that the Microsoft marketing department came up with. If you type ver at the command prompt, Windows 2000 identifies itself as Version 5.0. The Reg FOSS desk cynically suspects that the Windows 2000 moniker was intentionally chosen for its similarity to the unloved DOS-based Windows Millennium Edition so that customers would confuse them and buy the product aimed at lower-end systems.

And yes, we also know that Windows NT supported the Alpha chip from the very first version, NT 3.1, way back in 1993. However, all releases of Windows NT, from NT 3.1 to Windows 2000 at release, were 32-bit, so the Alpha version of NT was never able to use the 64-bit Alpha chip to its full potential.

Есть некоторые операционные системы, вызывающие уважение не только в момент релиза, но и многие годы спустя. Конечно, по тем или иным причинам рано или поздно и они уходят на покой, хотя порой, при желании разработчика, этот момент можно здорово оттянуть.

Именно так… не произошло с легендарной ОС Windows 2000. Первая из систем написанная для простых пользователей на профессиональном ядре NT, на рубеже тысячилетий она верой и правдой служила на десятках миллионов компьютеров по всему миру, показывая пример надёжности и защищённости от «кривых рук». Спустя несколько лет популярность начала набирать Windows XP, которая вытеснила предшественницу за счёт отличной поддержки многоядерности, то есть так называемой платформы x64. Стоит отметить, что в момент появления XP многие поклонники Win2000 просили Microsoft выпустить x64 версию их любимой ОС, но объяснив подобный релиз значительными сложностями, та отказалась идти на встречу общественности.

А действительно ли выпуск Windows 2000 x64 был невозможен?

При огромном желании, конечно, всё возможно и как рассказал энтузиаст по исследованию ретро программного обеспечения скрывающийся под ником Neozeed, такая ОС даже существовала!!!

 «Археолог» мира ПО поведал: некоторое время назад ему удалось найти давнишний 64-битный компилятор Dec Alpha C, созданный Microsoft для «сбора» в дееспособный продукт старых версий Windows NT. Далее он начал изучать некогда тестовые NT «сборки», в одной из которых и наткнулся на упоминание некоей «AXP64/ALPHA64 port», которая по слухам являлась той самой мистической Windows 2000 x64, не добравшейся до прилавков магазинов. После найденного упоминания, исследователь обратил внимание на тестовую платформу(наборы инструментариев для подготовки тестовых сборок) той самой версии NT — SDK Windows Platform 1999. В ней герой материала нашёл не только новое упоминание об «AXP64/ALPHA64 port», но и обнаружил уже набор компилятора AXP64! Это в свою очередь подтвердило, существование некоей x64 операционной системы, разрабатываемой, как отдельный продукт. Притом, в самом компиляторе, среди прочих технических подробностей прямо указывалась совместимость с ОС Win64, а это уже было чёткое упоминание версии Windows до XP с 64х разрядным ядром!

Своими находками Neozeed поделился на профильном форуме Virtually Fun, выразив надежду, что однажды кто-нибудь сможет откопать ту самую искомую версию Windows. После созданной на форуме темы началось самое интересное! Спустя некоторое время к дискуссии присоединился форумчанин tenox, рассказавший о действительно существовавшей в кулуарах Microsoft тестовой версии Windows 2000 x64:

«Проект Win64 для AXP64 и IA64 имел кодовое название Sundown. К сожалению, 64-разрядная версия Alpha AXP Windows никогда не выпускалась за пределами Редмонда»

То есть, стало точно ясно — данная ОС действительно была создана, но если она где-то и осталась, то только в недрах архивов разработчиков Windows, а те вряд ли будут заниматься ритуалами по воскрешению давно затерянных во времени артефактов.

… и в этот момент судьба оказалась к форумчанам благосклонна! Спустя ещё некоторое время ветвь дискуссии продолжил сам её создатель Neozeed, рассказавший удивительную историю: во время виртуальных дискуссий с ним связался неизвестный «щедрый читатель», сливший ему тестовую 64-битную сборку Windows 2000 для компилятора Alpha AXP! Неизвестный рассказал, что обнаружил «билд» в одном из списанных жёстких дисков, без уточнения иных подробностей.

Вместе с tenox, автор дискуссии сумели запустить добытую ОС, оказавшейся абсолютно той, что искалась и с возможностью запуска 64х битных приложений. После недолгого изучения системы, её техническое наименование нашлось в реестре Windows, где она именуется, как axp64chk.

Картинка с сайта: amd.news

Подводя итог, форумчане пришли к выводу, что данная 64х битная версия Windows 2000 стала тестовой для самой Microsoft. На ней специалисты компании «обкатывали» будущие приложения с поддержкой многоядерности, чтобы потом в виде XP выпустить отточенный продукт.

Кстати, Neozeed с tenox пообещали к компьютерной выставке VCF West 2023, намеченной на август текущего года полностью отреставрировать Windows 2000 x64 и представить её публике! Однозначно, такая операционная система станет настоящим подарком всем ретроклокерам мира.

Картинка с сайта: amd.news

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