Apparently before xRes was bought by Macromedia, they were courted by DEC and given one of these to encourage app development on the platform. I think DEC were pretty generous with hardware in this way, Macromedia had a lovely, huge DEC Alpha multiprocessor server under similar terms, with a 5-drive RAID rack and all the server goodies.

It happened to be in a cubicle they were moving me into, and I asked what it was. The reply was “that thing’s USELESS.” Words that to me, are like waving a red flag at a bull. So I turned it on and was surprised to see an NT 3.1 boot screen. Nobody remembered the password, though. I sat there and thought that maybe I could hack it. My second try was “xRes,” and that got me in.

I had access to the 3.5 installer floppies, so I gave that a go and it went smoothly. At the time, Macromedia’s IT department were pretty weak with support for Windows 95 long filenames and Windows support in general (they later hired me to help with that), so I got hold of a castoff SCSI hard drive and started using it as my own personal network server. Then my whole team started using it as such due to the aforementioned lameness in the IT department.

When NT 4.0 came out, it was the last version that supported the Alpha, and it again installed just fine (I had installed a CD-ROM drive by that time). I eventually leveraged what I learned about NT networking and hardware on that Alpha into a career change that happened at just the right time. The world was migrating to Microsoft Windows networking and experienced systems engineers were scarce. I got my MCSE for NT when nobody else seemed to have them.

When I left the company a couple of years later, the system (ALEC ALPHA-they didn’t want it but I built it anyway) had been retired and was gifted to me by my old group as a going away present. I kept it running as my home web and file server for a few more years. Being built like a tank, it was still working fine when I retired it.

If you set up a 4.0 boot on it, that will get you Internet Explorer at least. My memory may be faulty, but I seem to recall that even Netscape did a build for it at one point. Not 100% sure of that, though.

And you would need the firmware too. In the case of the SGI Indigo, for example… You have the HAL in source form in the leaked sources. So in theory would be possible to rebuild it from there…

But it would useless as we don’t have the SGI-MS ARC firmware dump for the Indigo. For many RISC NT machines is the same fate… You don’t only need the build, but also the machine itself, would be for the special wired CPU/Chipset as you said, or to dump firmware or specific microcodes which don’t exist anymore, or never came outside as commercial product.

Or HPPA, or SGI Indy – the problem is that even if they came up, you would need a little endian CPU for these. These were custom build CPU with flipped endiannes. I think MIPS can be reprogrammed, but not sure about SPARC or HPPA.

Oh thats awesome! I had one NetPower MIPS machine on the VCF West exhibit! https://virtuallyfun.com/2023/08/05/come-meet-tenox-check-out-the-nt-risc-collection-over-at-vcf/ – this is the machine https://virtuallyfun.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/NeTpower-Falcon-MP-starblazerII-scaled.jpg

Oh thats awesome! I had one NetPower MIPS machine on the VCF West exhibit! https://virtuallyfun.com/2023/08/05/come-meet-tenox-check-out-the-nt-risc-collection-over-at-vcf/ – this is the machine https://virtuallyfun.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/NeTpower-Falcon-MP-starblazerII-scaled.jpg