(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)
I was doing some work on my Alpha AXP with Windows NT and needed a decent text editor. I realized there wasn’t really anything beyond Notepad, until now, that is.
Crimson Editor for Windows NT AXP
http://www.tenox.net/get/cedt-ntaxp.zip
Metapad for Windows NT AXP
http://www.tenox.net/get/metapad-ntaxp.zip
Enjoy
Nice, will definitely be installed on my AlphaNT. Thank you!
I mean, one could use the VS IDE as a (big) text editor…
And I often did but VS6 text editor is still poor compared to something like Crimson.
This is awesome! Please continue to dig up stuff like this for AXP machines!
I was going to make a joke about “decent editors” meaning Emacs and vi must not be available, but I checked and Emacs at least is – http://ftp.gnu.org/old-gnu/emacs/windows/19.34/ contains alpha, i386, mips and ppc binaries apparently. I haven’t actually tried any of them, and I know not many people would actually like to use them 🙂 These look nice!
Just tried to get it working for 5 minutes, but it always crashes on my Alphastation with NT4. I will use some more time on it during the next few days.
On a different note: I just realised that there are alpha binaries of tar, gunzip and gzip here: https://ftp.gnu.org/old-gnu/emacs/windows/utilities/alpha/
They are pretty old (1993), but they do work…
Well I probably should have meant GUI based editor. Emacs and vi decent as they are I wanted some nice GUI with syntax highlighting etc. For text / console editors there will be another post soon.
I don’t remember Emacs 19.34 very well, but I’m pretty sure it had syntax highlighting, drop-down menus (at least on X, but I imagine on Win32 too), etc. It’s just that things like syntax highlighting aren’t turned on out of the box, and neither are CUA keys, so there’s a big learning curve.
Also, a more mainstream contemporary editor, if anyone is interested:
PC Magazine – 13 Sep 1994 – Page 327: “Visual SlickEdit for Windows, Version 1.5 ($295), a programming editor available for Microsoft Windows 3.1 and for Microsoft Windows NT on DEC Alpha AXP, MIPS, and x86 platforms.”
I’ve never tried it, nor do I have it, it just occurred to me that there might have been a SlickEdit build for Alpha, so I checked.
Additionally, this page: ftp://69.43.38.172/mirrors/cd.textfiles.com/cica9710/ALPHA/00_INDEX.HTM contains Emacs 19.17 builds as well as lots of other AXP stuff.
Totally off topic, but I seem to recall reading on here that there’s a real lack of Alpha software available… if you’re after something audio based, there is Sonic Foundry ACID Music; I was shocked to see they mention Alpha support! It’s on archive.org here:
https://archive.org/details/SonicFoundryACIDMusic
The real hinderance for the RISC machines was the lack of any cross compiler. Although having built stuff for PowerPC on OS X i386, it was far too often a best effort guess if it’d run, and all too easy did it run on Rosetta emulation, but not bare iron.