Windows NT on i860

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adun
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Windows NT on i860

Post by adun »

According to wikipedia windows NT was first developped on the intel i860
Microsoft initially developed what was to become Windows NT on internally designed i860XR-based workstations (codenamed Dazzle), only porting NT to the MIPS (Microsoft Jazz), Intel 386 and other processors later. The NT designation originally referred to the "N-Ten" (i860 XR) processor.[11]
My question is: does anybody know if there exists a build of windows NT or MS OS/2 that was capable of running on that processor. It would be very nice to know because I will soon get my hands on such a processor type.

Greets

louisw3
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Re: Windows NT on i860

Post by louisw3 »

i860's and i960's were popular in laser printers, raid controllers and lots of military stuff...

although even if you could find NT for the i860 it would be text mode, and very disappointing.

if microsoft had anything to show for it, there would have been demos in 89 or 90 (remember NT started in 1988!) Rather NT made its first public appearances in 1990, and by that time they had switched to the MIPS. And we have both the October i386 only, and December i386 and MIPS versions.

But Qemu cannot run the MIPS 1990 builds.
"Those who don't understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." – Henry Spencer

mallard
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Re: Windows NT on i860

Post by mallard »

I very much doubt that the work which went into "NT" on the i860 was more than very early work on the kernel. I don't know what exactly what sort of development hardware Microsoft had access to, but it wouldn't have been a full-blown computer. Development boards around that time were usually just circuit boards with a bunch of I/O pins and (usually) two serial ports - one for uploading code/data (directly into RAM or a few KB of flash) and debugging, the other for interfacing with the running program. The only "user interface" that you'd get would be a serial console.

NT didn't even have the Win32 subsystem until later, so they'll be virtually nothing recognisable at such an early stage of development. No filesystem, no recognisable command line, just a kernel and some debugging tools.

Stephanos
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Re: Windows NT on i860

Post by Stephanos »

Although no official build is available, there are multiple i860 references left in the NT 4 source tree.

== nt\private\ntos\dll\sources.nap
(49 ) i860_SOURCES=i860\critsect.s \
(50 ) i860\usrstubs.s \
(51 ) i860\ldrthunk.s

== nt\private\net\sfm\afp\test\acldump\sources
(93 ) #i860_SOURCES=i860\source1.s

== nt\private\sdktools\perftool\timer\win32\bin\_objects.mac
(6 ) obj\i860\timer.obj

== nt\private\posix\inc\psxi860.h
the file name should be self explanatory in this case.

Unfortunately, the actual i860 directory containing the i860 architecture-specific code was deleted for the NT 4 source tree. At least, from nt\private\ntos\dll\sources.nap, we can infer to the possibility that the full NT kernel (ntos\dll is for ntdll.dll) was developed on i860.

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Re: Windows NT on i860

Post by jimmsta »

From a recent article I read (http://winsupersite.com/windows/supersi ... rst-decade), most of the development for the i860 was actually done in a simulator, and not on actual hardware. Once the hardware became available, Microsoft discovered that performance was atrocious and decided to move over to the MIPS platform.
16 years of BA experience; I refurbish old electronics, and archive diskettes with a KryoFlux. My posting history is 16 years of educated speculation and autism.

joekster
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Re: Windows NT on i860

Post by joekster »

Looks like there really was real i860 hardware for NT development.

https://www.si.edu/object/microsoft-win ... mah_742558

AlphaBeta
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Re: Windows NT on i860

Post by AlphaBeta »

The i860 port actually might have had graphics, as mentioned on Raymond Chen's blog:
And while Razzle provided the software half of the Windows NT story, the hardware part originally came from a project called Dazzle. Dazzle was a single-board i860 computer.

Larry Osterman actually used a Dazzle, though “used” might be a rather generous term. It was basically a breadboard with a VGA port in the back. As Larry recalls, they had Reversi running on it, but the pieces were squares rather than circles.

Why squares and not circles?

Because GDI didn’t support circles yet!
I suppose that the board posted in the post above would have been a later revision of Dazzle.
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xelloss
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Re: Windows NT on i860

Post by xelloss »

joekster wrote:
Tue Oct 19, 2021 5:14 pm
Looks like there really was real i860 hardware for NT development.
Jeez, all those flying wires almost make me feel sick.

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Re: Windows NT on i860

Post by 1ST1 »

joekster wrote:
Tue Oct 19, 2021 5:14 pm
Looks like there really was real i860 hardware for NT development.

https://www.si.edu/object/microsoft-win ... mah_742558
This seems only to be onme of the developement systems, maybe the early ones.

I did some researches and found the report of a former Olivetti engineer which moved to Microsoft to continue the work on NT on i860. Olivetti used to have some machines with i860 sockets, they were the CP486, M486 and LSX 5010, LSX 5020 machines, massive large pedestral towers and the M486 desktop based all on the same mainboard. The CP486 was the first one, introduced in CeBit 1989 to the public, later renamed to LSX 5010. See https://olivetticomputers.fandom.com/wi ... etti_CP486. I have two pieces of LSX 5020 but they still are not running stable. I already replaced all capacitors on the mainboards which improved the situation a lot (they were almost dead before), but they still freeze while booting from floppy or starting the EISA setup, so I am not able to do much. so I think I also have to rework the power supplies.

Unfortunatelly I can not attach some pictures, I am tooo new for this forum, need one more verified posting...

Hyoenmadan86
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Re: Windows NT on i860

Post by Hyoenmadan86 »

Stephanos wrote:
Fri Dec 26, 2014 1:27 pm
... Although no official build is available, there are multiple i860 references left in the NT 4 source tree...
Since this was written, NT3.5 sources leaked and became available somewhere else. You still may find some i860 detritus there, but even in NT3.5x almost every traces of i860 code were already removed. Although if Olivetti i860 support engineers were working in team with MS in their Redmond campus, you still may find Olivetti HAL support code for the i860 found in those special 486 workstations there.

1ST1
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Re: Windows NT on i860

Post by 1ST1 »

Now I might be able to post some images...

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This is out of the "Theory of Operations" for M486, CP486, LSX 5010, LSX 5020 document. Unfortunatelly no programming instructions how to control the switching between the two CPUs, only the electronic logics description, there are even PAL/GAL source codes, but no complete circuit diagram of the board. The programming technique might be able to be reverse engineered from the LSX 5010/5020 customer service diskette diagnostic module to test the i860 processor. But this is outside of my know-how.
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louisw3
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Re: Windows NT on i860

Post by louisw3 »

every time I feel like this is a dead end, and then 10+ years later something interesting surfaces!

Great info 1ST1!
"Those who don't understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." – Henry Spencer

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