![]() ![]() The Reg FOSS desk cynically suspects that the Windows 2000 moniker was intentionally chosen for its similarity to the unloved DOS-based Windows Millennium Edition so that customers would confuse them and buy the product aimed at lower-end systems.Īnd yes, we also know that Windows NT supported the Alpha chip from the very first version, NT 3.1, way back in 1993. If you type ver at the command prompt, Windows 2000 identifies itself as Version 5.0. "Windows 2000" was just the branding that the Microsoft marketing department came up with. ® BootnoteĪll right, yes, we know: if you're going to be pedantic, Windows 11 and everything before it are Windows NT under the hood. Nothing else could, which perhaps explains why Intel flogged its Arm line to Marvell in 2006. Obviously, the first pure 64-bit RISC chip couldn't be allowed to compete with either x86 or Itanium. If this has made you wonder whatever became of Alpha, one eventual fallout of the 1998 Compaq/DEC acquisition, followed by the 2001 HP/Compaq acquisition, is that Intel ended up owning Alpha. Given that the Alpha CPU shipped way back in 1992, and NT shipped with a 32-bit Alpha version the following year, it's of note that it took so long – approaching a decade – for Win64 to become available even in test versions. No, this isn't of any particular use to anyone in 2023, but it's interesting all the same. The new discovery reveals that there was already a 64-bit version of Windows – and a desktop edition, at that – over a year before even preview builds were officially, publicly released, which means that there's a target for the newly uncovered compiler. Microsoft is busy rewriting core Windows code in memory-safe Rust.No more feature updates for Windows 10 – current version is final.Windows 11 wrecks speech recognition for some apps.Microsoft will upgrade Windows 10 21H2 users whether they like it or not.All the other non-Intel versions of Windows 2000 were discontinued before the product was released, although 32-bit beta versions running on Alpha, MIPS, and PowerPC had been spotted in the wild. A preview 64-bit version of Windows 2000 Server for Itanium was released to Technet subscribers in 2001. Before AMD's Sledgehammer range of processors, announced in 2000 and on sale in 2003, the only official 64-bit Windows were server versions for Intel's ill-fated Itanium processor family, which The Register was already referring to as Itanic back in 1999. These, though, were aimed at 64-bit x86 computers. However, if you were really keen, it was possible to obtain Windows XP Professional X64 Edition – in fact, based on the Windows Server 2003 codebase rather than XP per se – sometime earlier. The first desktop version of Windows to officially support 64-bit processors out of the box was Windows Vista in 2006. ![]()
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