I sent you an email with the deets

Mee too plz? 🙂

It’s fine replying to old stuff, it shows up.

Finding old Soviet stuff is really difficult, at least back then. And being an outsider makes it all the more difficult. It was kinda fun though.

There must be some 32bit advanced stuff, I saw something written mostly in modula 2, even with a Tetris.

Maybe it’s still in use, hence the information scarcity

I emailed you a link

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find versions for other architectures too (I understand and speak Russian, then I can google in Russian). Maybe I’ll try to ask someone…

There’s no vi. But I built it. But it doesn’t support Cyrillic.
When I found the FPGA project https://github.com/forth32/dvk-fpga – I decided to have DEMOS on it, and I had to recompile the kernel.

Ctrl+N (RU) / Ctrl+O (EN) are used to change language (actually, there’re RUS and LAT keys on Soviet terminals, or sometimes one RUS/LAT key which sends those sequences).

I found out that the image doesn’t have all utilities / headers / etc., something I had to build. I wrote a little here https://merclangrat.wordpress.com/2025/08/28/35-years-since-the-soviet-unions-first-internet-connection/ and would try to make a website.

This one kind of leaked out into the world a few years back. Although you can run it under emulation now.

So, it’s the only exposure to ALPHA64 the majority of us ever had, well outside until one day I had discovered that the ALPHA64 SDK on the Windows 2000 Platform SDK pre-releases included the full toolchain.

At least being able to run Alpha under emulation now, it’s not as painful having to have an Alpha to cross compile ALPHA64 stuff now. It was a pain constantly rebooting to test before.. well, before my Alpha died anyways. It’s a fun bit of dead-end evolutionary tech though. That weird twilight.

I’d imagine DEC wrote the PAL code? I know the compiler is GEM based, but then again, all the RISC compilers were vendor supplied not Microsoft, which is a shame as we couldn’t blindly cross compile on i386.

Also check out this exciting branch of es40! ES1370 & MPU401 support works on the ’32bit’ alpha stuff, even the alpha version WinAmp runs! Sadly there are no audio drivers on ALPHA64..