Well this was unexpected find! Thanks to hyenasky over on discord.
While the platform had a few mentions here and there but it’s great to have found a talk about the product with video of it running.
Interestingly enough Compaq was apparently in charge of the ARC specifications? Also kind of funny how the do touch on that maybe one day it could be available for the Dec Alpha, but as we know DEC pivoted away from the MIPS entirely to focus on the Alpha.
The other part being how the Pentium/Pentium Pro was entirely unexpected from the wider RISC market that thought they had the migration point out of 386/486 based machines.
Unfortunately, like the platform, Alexandre Bronstein exited DEC to go onto other ventures, oddly enough at Veritas being pulled back into dealing with Microsoft with the disk manager.
What a great video, thanks a lot!
NT would be fun to run on my DECstations here – I didn’t know that the port originally started on the PMAX (5000/200) machines, not the Maxines (Personal DECstation 5000).
But it seems that none of the DECstation NT versions ever escaped from Microsoft (and one would probably also need an ARC firmware version for the machines)?
I think the MIPS support on the NT3.1 prereleases are built for MIPS, Inc. machines such as the RC2030 or the R4000 Magnums (though there are very few places in which DECstations are mentioned).
When the machine crashes about an hour twenty four minutes in, we see this, and this, which look more like SRM.
It would be a matter if securing media, but I don’t think any of that survived. He was using the available binaries (12/1991?) from the CD, but his own loader/hal/drivers