So, I used to think Lan Manager Domains and early NT Domains were the same thing

Obviously, this was wrong.

And besides the NetBEUI being eaten on the network for no reason I can see, as I’m sure these machines should be able to talk to each-other this was the end result:

The OS/2 domain is not a Windows NT domain

And what about not trying to create a machine account?

The domain controller for this domain cannot be located.

I should have expected this not to work.

Having dumped NetBEUI for TCP/IP, I can see them talk, it’s not a name resolution issue or anything like that. On the flip side can LAN Manager join a Windows NT domain? I’m not sure on that one either.

And not too surprising using the LAN Manager DOS client I can log onto the OS/2 domain just fine.

Kind of verbose and annoying but yes, it works!

However, despite LAN Manager 2.2 providing a TCP/IP stack to connect to both OS/2 and NT servers, there is no winsock interoperability dll. Do I really have to load more than one NIC and stack at the same time?!

The one thing I had been hoping to build up to was using mailslots, a UDP like IPC/RPC mechanism from back in the old dark days of early LAN Manager 1.0 The can be broadcasted to all nodes on the network that are listening by writing to \\*\MAILSLOT\<YOUR LOCAL BOX>. On the surface these broadcast type things are modern day terrible, we prefer lookup services like DNS, but in the 80’s it’s not like people were going to put tens of thousands of machines on a single network…

The Mandelbrot example

I cannot thank my Patrons enough for this attempt at doing something multitenant as I really did need Microsoft C 6, and the Windows 3.0 SDK. The example from the Lan Manager 2.0 Programmer’s Toolkit (Why was this stuff never in the base SDK?!) shows an OS/2 LAN Manager service providing rendering services over the network to render the Mandelbrot to the Win16 client. It’s actually very neat. It really gives OS/2 that pre-Windows NT feel, with the services as they are not in your face, although at the same time I’ve found that I had to do an interactive logon to get things started, so maybe LAN Manager OS/2 servers were not “Lights out”? I guess I need to look more into it, as it just feels more and more how NTOS2/ clearly grew out of OS/2 + LAN Manager.

Obviously as soon as I see this, thanks to getting my hands on the OS/2 6.78 network client, I also see it’s not only obsolete but going to be removed. If anything, it’s impressive that an OS/2 feature has remained in NT for so long.

The LAN Manager 1.0 disk sets, actually include headers & libraries, but no examples.

I had wanted to do something with TCPIP and mailslots, and I had figured that Windows NT would be the best glue being in that perfect space of OS/2 compatibility and robust TCP/IP, but I wasted far too much time to basically see that if they are not part of the same domain, the mailslot’s just don’t work.

I haven’t given up, but I primarily used Netware for PC networking back in the 90’s so this is all kind of new to me. Looking through resource kits online there doesn’t seem to be a lot of material about integrating LAN Manager into a NT Domain.

I’ll have to re-think this.

Word & Excel for MIPS

Years ago when I’d bought Office 4.2 for Windows NT, it only included i386 & Alpha builds of Word and Excel in the box, and a coupon for MIPS and PowerPC.

About the only thing interesting is that it actually ran under Win32s.

But today looking at term24‘s uploads on archive.org, I saw two CD-ROM images:

I quickly fired up Qemu MIPS NT, and confirmed that both do in fact contain a MIPS version! Excel does have the PowerPC version as well.

As far as I know the only RISC platform to get apps from Office 97 was the Dec Alpha, but at least MIPS users can rejoice now, knowing that they too have been blessed with 32bit Office 4.2 apps!

One of the amazing things about NT & portable apps is that visually, they look identical. So other than me telling you that these are the MIPS native versions, there really is no way to tell.

Well, other than there is no ntvdm running. There is no WOW needed here!

100% native.

I guess the only other question is that since the Word is 1994, and Excel is from 1995, did they have earlier versions for Windows NT? It seems like everything was finally coming together for RISC NT, except the users. Would a release of 64bit Windows 2000 on Dec Alpha save the platform by bringing a strong 64bit platform with integrated JIT i386 WoW built in? (AXP64 Windows 2000 didn’t use !FX32). I guess we’ll never know.

GCC for Windows NT / Dec Alpha?

Somehow I never noticed this until making what seemed like a pointless GCC config.

You can apparently build a GCC like this:

sh configure –host=i386-winnt35 –target=alpha-winnt35

And you can get a cross compiler.

The real question is, does it work?  I don’t know I don’t have a cross assembler, linker or a target machine.

 


D:\proj\gcc-3.0.4\gcc>xgcc -v
Using builtin specs.
Configured with: : (reconfigured) : (reconfigured) : (reconfigured)
Thread model: single
gcc version 3.0.4

D:\proj\gcc-3.0.4\gcc>xgcc -v -S hi.c
Using builtin specs.
Configured with: : (reconfigured) : (reconfigured) : (reconfigured)
Thread model: single
gcc version 3.0.4
cc1 -lang-c -v -iprefix ../lib/gcc-lib/alpha-winnt35/3.0.4/ -D__GNUC__=3 -D__GNUC_MINOR__=0 -D__GNUC_PATCHLEVEL__=4 -DWIN32 -D_WIN32 -DWINNT -D__STDC__=0 -DALMOST_STDC -D_M_ALPHA -D_ALPHA_ -D_LONGLONG -D__unaligned= -D__stdcall= -D__WIN32__ -D_WIN32 -D__WINNT__ -D__STDC__=0 -D__ALMOST_STDC__ -D_M_ALPHA -D_ALPHA_ -D_LONGLONG -D__unaligned= -D__stdcall= -D__WIN32 -D__WINNT -D__ALMOST_STDC -Asystem=winnt -D__NO_INLINE__ -D__STDC_HOSTED__=1 -D__LANGUAGE_C__ -D__LANGUAGE_C -DLANGUAGE_C -Acpu=alpha -Amachine=alpha -D__alpha -D__alpha__ -D__alpha_ev4__ -Acpu=ev4 hi.c -quiet -dumpbase hi.c -version -o hi.s
GNU CPP version 3.0.4 (cpplib)
GNU C version 3.0.4 (alpha-winnt35)
compiled by GNU C version 5.1.0.
ignoring nonexistent directory “../lib/gcc-lib/alpha-winnt35/3.0.4/include”
ignoring nonexistent directory “../lib/gcc-lib/alpha-winnt35/3.0.4/../../../../alpha-winnt35/sys-include”
ignoring nonexistent directory “../lib/gcc-lib/alpha-winnt35/3.0.4/../../../../alpha-winnt35/include”
ignoring nonexistent directory “NONE/include”
ignoring nonexistent directory “D:/pcem/building/MinGW/msys/1.0/local/lib/gcc-lib/alpha-winnt35/3.0.4/include”
ignoring nonexistent directory “D:/pcem/building/MinGW/msys/1.0/local/lib/gcc-lib/alpha-winnt35/3.0.4/../../../../alpha-winnt35/sys-include”
ignoring nonexistent directory “D:/pcem/building/MinGW/msys/1.0/local/lib/gcc-lib/alpha-winnt35/3.0.4/../../../../alpha-winnt35/include”
#include “…” search starts here:
End of search list.
: warning: “__STDC__” redefined
: warning: this is the location of the previous definition
: warning: “__STDC__” redefined
: warning: this is the location of the previous definition
hi.c: In function `main’:
hi.c:3: warning: return type of `main’ is not `int’

This is what the output looks like, which looks nothing like targeting the i386 so I guess so?


.set noreorder
.set volatile
.set noat
.globl __fltused
.file 1 "hi.c"
.rdata
.quad 0
$LC0:
.ascii "Hello from GCC %s\12\0"
$LC1:
.ascii "3.0.4\0"
.text
.align 2
.globl main
.ent main
main:
.frame $15,0,$26,0
.mask 0x4008000,0
lda $30,-16($30)
stq $26,0($30)
stq $15,8($30)
mov $30,$15
.prologue 0
jsr $26,__main
lda $1,$LC0
addl $1,$31,$2
lda $1,$LC1
addl $1,$31,$1
mov $2,$16
mov $1,$17
jsr $26,printf
mov $15,$30
ldq $26,0($30)
ldq $15,8($30)
lda $30,16($30)
ret $31,($26),1
.end main

Just for you, lucky Spanish user, GCC 3.0.4 for Windows NT (MinGW)

From Spain!

I cannot understand why you want this, or why I’m even going to do it.  At this point in GCC history the winnt-3.5 target had been dumped in favour of going all in with Cygwin.  So yeah, this does not either clearly configure, or compile.  But a little bit of mashing files, and I have it at least compiling some assembly that can be translated into an object file that a later version of MinGW can actually compile.

All I’ve built is the gcc driver, the cpp pre-processor, and the cc1 aka C backend.

D:\proj\gcc-3.0.4\gcc>xgcc -c -v hi.c
Using builtin specs.
Configured with:
Thread model: single
gcc version 3.0.4
cc1 -lang-c -v -iprefix ../lib/gcc-lib/i386-winnt35/3.0.4/ -D__GNUC__=3 -D__GNUC_MINOR__=0 -D__GNUC_PATCHLEVEL__=4 -Dunix -DWIN32 -D_WIN32 -DWINNT -D_M_IX86=300 -D_X86_=1 -D__STDC__=0 -DALMOST_STDC -D_MSC_VER=800 -D__stdcall=__attribute__((__stdcall__)) -D__cdecl=__attribute__((__cdecl__)) -D_cdecl=__attribute__((__cdecl__)) -D__unix__ -D__WIN32__ -D_WIN32 -D__WINNT__ -D_M_IX86=300 -D_X86_=1 -D__STDC__=0 -D__ALMOST_STDC__ -D_MSC_VER=800 -D__stdcall=__attribute__((__stdcall__)) -D__cdecl=__attribute__((__cdecl__)) -D__cdecl__=__attribute__((__cdecl__)) -D__unix -D__WIN32 -D__WINNT -D__ALMOST_STDC -D__cdecl=__attribute__((__cdecl__)) -Asystem=unix -Asystem=winnt -D__NO_INLINE__ -D__STDC_HOSTED__=1 -Acpu=i386 -Amachine=i386 -Di386 -D__i386 -D__i386__ -D__tune_i386__ hi.c -quiet -dumpbase hi.c -version -o C:\Users\jason\AppData\Local\Temp\ccpflisr.s
GNU CPP version 3.0.4 (cpplib) (80386, BSD syntax)
GNU C version 3.0.4 (i386-winnt35)
compiled by GNU C version 5.1.0.
ignoring nonexistent directory "../lib/gcc-lib/i386-winnt35/3.0.4/include"
ignoring nonexistent directory "../lib/gcc-lib/i386-winnt35/3.0.4/../../../../i386-winnt35/include"
ignoring nonexistent directory "D:/pcem/building/MinGW/msys/1.0/local/include"
ignoring nonexistent directory "NONE/include"
ignoring nonexistent directory "D:/pcem/building/MinGW/msys/1.0/local/lib/gcc-lib/i386-winnt35/3.0.4/include"
ignoring nonexistent directory "D:/pcem/building/MinGW/msys/1.0/local/lib/gcc-lib/i386-winnt35/3.0.4/../../../../i386-winnt35/include"
ignoring nonexistent directory "/usr/include"
#include "..." search starts here:
End of search list.
: warning: "__STDC__" redefined
: warning: this is the location of the previous definition
: warning: "__STDC__" redefined
: warning: this is the location of the previous definition
hi.c: In function `main':
hi.c:3: warning: return type of `main' is not `int'
as --traditional-format -o hi.o C:\Users\jason\AppData\Local\Temp\ccpflisr.s

D:\proj\gcc-3.0.4\gcc>gcc hi.o -o hi

D:\proj\gcc-3.0.4\gcc>hi
Hello from GCC 3.0.4

So there you go, mysterious internet user!  Download my source dump with binaries in the tree because I’m lazy.

gcc-3.0.4-MinGW.7z

Ssystem 1.6

ssystem logo

With all the talk of a possible ‘rocky’ earth like planet making the news, I thought it would be fun to seek out a really ancient (ha!) OpenGL program that did a basic simulation of our solar system.  I am of course talking about ssytem.

Back in the late 90’s I have to admit that this was pretty incredible to look at!  Although it was using OpenGL in software only, and to be honest the best and more stable way to use ssystem was on Windows of all things.

Microsoft had a deal with SGI around the 1993 timeline, and after the release of Windows NT 3.1 they were able to work out a deal to bring Windows NT to the SGI MIPS computers platform in exchange from OpenGL being made available on Windows NT.  SGI couldn’t see a way to monetize NT on their hardware and the port never actually shipped, evidence of it however is present in the leaked Windows NT 4.0 source code.  However OpenGL would prove very import for Microsoft as workstation style graphics could now run on ‘prosumer’ grade OS Windows NT 3.5, and eventually there was even a runtime for Windows 95!

All the old websites, and archives of ssystem have been wiped out, however I did find a copy of the source code for version 1.6 on a HPUX site of all places.

ssystem-1.6-src-11.00.tar.gz

With a filename tracked down, I was able to locate in archvie.org a partial backup of the main site here: http://www1.las.es/~amil/ssystem/english.html

So I thought I could start there.  Ssystem needs the GLUT toolkit and I found a ‘pre-configured’ version 3.7 that Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 can build on the command line here. Naturally with all the textures, it does rely on the IJG JPEG library (libjpeg) and I used version 6b as ssystem itself dates from 1999.

There was a bit of work to be done with the source code, as I had to massage it to compile with Visual C++, lots of missing headers, and there were some collisions in the lex for parsing the config file, but they were trivial to clean up.  After a bit of going back and forth with a seemingly defective pre-built version of GLUT, re-building it myself got it to link a working executable:

ssystem in orbit around Europa.

ssystem in orbit around Europa.

Of course in this day & age, any machine these days has hardware OpenGL acceleration so it is pretty trivial to run this program.

The artifacts in the picture were common at the time, and it’s how I remember it all those years ago so I’m not to worried about it.

I tried to compile with Visual C++ 4.0 however when trying to link I got this error:

Microsoft (R) 32-Bit Incremental Linker Version 3.00.5270
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp 1992-1995. All rights reserved.

init.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol _glBindTexture
ssystem.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol _glBindTexture
stars.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol _glBindTexture
init.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol _glGenTextures
astrolib.exe : fatal error LNK1120: 2 unresolved externals
NMAKE : fatal error U1077: ‘link’ : return code ‘0x19’
Stop.

I’m not sure why, as I re-compiled with Visual C++ 6.0 and I get a working executable.  More bizarre if I try to link the objects that were compiled with Visual C++ 4.0 with Visual C++ 6.0 it also fails in the same way.

I’ve placed in everything I could find into this archive: ssystem-1.6.7z including a pre-compiled version, and the high resolution images.  Along the way I also did find a backup of the site http://www.wam.umd.edu/~kamelkev/Ssystem which actually has a much smaller download of ssystem 1.6 as ssystem-1.6.zip  You may need to play with ssystem.conf to get a more respectable display.  I have also tweeked it to work find on my machine, using the highest values I could get away with, without running over the 2GB per process limit on 32bit processes.

SetiHomeBanner

Let’s also not forget the SETI crazy of the 1990’s.

Did you know that GCC used to support Windows NT ?

I’m not talking about MingGW, Cygwin or anything else like that, but rather when support for Windows NT first appeared, it had to be compiled with Microsoft Visual C++ 1.0 of all things.

It was back in the 2.6 days of GCC, right before the stagnation that led to EGCS.

`i[345]86-*-winnt3.5'
     This version requires a GAS that has not yet been released.  Until
     it is, you can get a prebuilt binary version via anonymous ftp from
     `cs.washington.edu:pub/gnat' or `cs.nyu.edu:pub/gnat'. You must
     also use the Microsoft header files from the Windows NT 3.5 SDK.
     Find these on the CDROM in the `/mstools/h' directory dated
     9/4/94.  You must use a fixed version of Microsoft linker made
     especially for NT 3.5, which is also is available on the NT 3.5
     SDK CDROM.  If you do not have this linker, can you also use the
     linker from Visual C/C++ 1.0 or 2.0.

     Installing GNU CC for NT builds a wrapper linker, called `ld.exe',
     which mimics the behaviour of Unix `ld' in the specification of
     libraries (`-L' and `-l').  `ld.exe' looks for both Unix and
     Microsoft named libraries.  For example, if you specify `-lfoo',
     `ld.exe' will look first for `libfoo.a' and then for `foo.lib'.

     You may install GNU CC for Windows NT in one of two ways,
     depending on whether or not you have a Unix-like shell and various
     Unix-like utilities.

       1. If you do not have a Unix-like shell and few Unix-like
          utilities, you will use a DOS style batch script called
          `configure.bat'.  Invoke it as `configure winnt' from an
          MSDOS console window or from the program manager dialog box.
          `configure.bat' assumes you have already installed and have
          in your path a Unix-like `sed' program which is used to
          create a working `Makefile' from `Makefile.in'.

          `Makefile' uses the Microsoft Nmake program maintenance
          utility and the Visual C/C++ V8.00 compiler to build GNU CC.
          You need only have the utilities `sed' and `touch' to use
          this installation method, which only automatically builds the
          compiler itself.  You must then examine what `fixinc.winnt'
          does, edit the header files by hand and build `libgcc.a'
          manually.

       2. The second type of installation assumes you are running a
          Unix-like shell, have a complete suite of Unix-like utilities
          in your path, and have a previous version of GNU CC already
          installed, either through building it via the above
          installation method or acquiring a pre-built binary.  In this
          case, use the `configure' script in the normal fashion.

Well, that is quite the tall order!  I can’t believe I somehow managed to build it back then, and out of curiosity I managed to build it again.  And as you can see you need a ‘beta’ release of the GAS assembler, which is kind of impossible to find now, but it was part of the GNAT project, which used to distribute binary builds of the GCC core back in the day.  Luckily, I have a version stuffed away, although it’s from GCC 2.8.1, not as ancient as it would have when GCC 2.6 was a new thing.   But it at least assembles enough for my simple Hello World experiment.

To build GCC you need a working SED, which surprisingly CL 8.0 from the Win32s SDK, and it runs fine on Windows 7 x64 of all things.  I had to mess with some of the files, and substitute the linker & headder files from Visual C++ 2.0 but much to my amazement not only can I build GCC along with libgcc.a, it also builds incredibly fast.  On my machine I can compile GCC in about 5 seconds. Â I remember in 1995 building this on Windows 95 (I was crazy) and it is taking HOURS and HOURS.

So, one nice thing about these binaries is that you don’t need any external DLL’s  Even the import section of a simple hello world exe is tiny:

GetVersion GetEnvironmentStrings GetCommandLineA ExitProcess RtlUnwind UnhandledExceptionFilter GetModuleFileNameA GetFileType GetStdHandle GetStartupInfoA VirtualFree VirtualAlloc WriteFile WideCharToMultiByte GetLastError FlushFileBuffers SetFilePointer SetStdHandle CloseHandle KERNEL32.dll

Which implies that it only needs KERNEL32 to function.

I don’t know if it’s of any use to anyone else, but HERE is my dump of all the source and tools I used to build GCC.

Upgrading through Windows NT; Windows NT 3.5

NT 3.5

With Windows NT 3.1 out the door there was a LOT of work to be done behind the scenes to bring Windows NT up to a more polished level, and this was most certainly achieved with Windows NT 3.5 . This version did something pretty much unheard of, which is that it dropped the hardware requirements from Windows NT 3.1 . It is almost all too easy to get lost in all the new features but I’ll try to keep a list.

  • OpenGL (software only)
  • New TCP/IP Stack
  • More complete Win32 support
  • Ability to run Win16 apps in separate WOW instances.
  • Added complete support for the Dec Alpha
  • IDE CD-ROM support
  • AppleTalk
  • Netware Requester
  • PPP/Slip
For me this was a major release, in that now Windows NT was actually usable, esp with the memory requirement dropped, and the overall speed increased NT 3.5 could actually be used.  The dialup PPP support that was a SNAP to configure was the thing that won me over, I never could get the dialup scripts for CHAP/PAP/PPP on Linux to work right, but within a few minutes of installing NT 3.5, I was on the internet.
One of the cools things that came out of the Microsoft SGi collaborative was OpenGL on Windows NT.  This was no doubt to bring NT into the real ‘workstation’ level of OS, and to give us great real-time 3d graphics.  This was also the source of a lot of ‘server issues’ because people *LOVED* the OpenGL screen savers so much they enabled them everywhere, not realizing that they would easily take 100% of the CPU.  The OpenGL was so good, that it even scaled on SMP systems, again killing them for 100% of the CPU across all CPUs.  You wouldn’t be very popular loading them on the departmental SQL server.

Outside of internet applications all I pretty much ran at the time was old Win16 stuff like Turbo C++ for Windows, Watcom C++ and I’d try to run windows games, but NT just needed too much memory compared to MS-DOS/Windows 3.1 … it was a while before memory got cheap enough to tip the balance, but I did only have 8MB back then.
As for the applications I installed on NT 3.1, they all worked fine, MS-Word for DOS & OS/2, Excel 3, and Doom 1.1 ran great.
I should also mention that there was a 32bit version of Office for NT 3.5, Office 4.2 for NT. This added 32bit versions of Word & Excel for NT Alpha/i386.  I don’t think there was ever native versions for the MIPS.
Windows NT 3.5 received three service packs before it was ultimately superceeded by Windows NT 3.51