Welp, today Microsoft announced that Windows Server 2012 and 2012 r2 will be EoS (End of Support) on October 10th.
These EoS announcements always make me feel my age, because it seems like just a few weeks ago I was testing 2012 to replace my 2008 r2 systems – and being irked at the Windows 8 UI they used for it…
But that was a decade ago.
I remember when I first got on the Windows Server train back in 1995. Windows NT 3.51 for workstations had just been released and I wanted to see what all the hubbub was about. At that time I was running Solaris and Novell systems at work, which were the big dogs in the workstation / network arena, but Windows was the big dog in the home market – so I was curious.
The big thing that NT 3.51 did that got me onboard was to support RISC architectures like PPC, Alpha, and MIPS – because my systems at home at the time were PPC, Alpha, and MIPS machines. I did have a few IA-32 based machines laying around too, but mostly for games and BBS duty (MajorBBS at the time used DOS and phar lap). But most of my day-to-day computing was on RISC machines running things like MacOS, DEC OSF/1 AXP, or IRIX.
Anyway, I got NT 3.51 running on my DEC AlphaStation 200 with only a few issues, and after some initial grumbling about it I decided to keep it around…
Then a year later, in ’96, came NT 4…
NT 4 SP1 marked the end of MIPS support, SP2 the end of PPC support, and SP6 the end of Alpha support – but by then I’d picked up enough expertise with NT that I stuck with it on x86 and x64 hardware.
My entire career has been keynoted by my use of non-standard architectures and operating systems though, and even in the most Windows-based organization I still manage to do things with Linux running on oddball hardware… Like when I set up Marianapolis’ servers, labs, and student area computers – everything was Apple; Xserves and eMacs everywhere. Or at work today; my Active Directory and file servers are Windows because my user-base is Windows, but everything else is either Linux or MacOS.
And even here in 2023, 40+ years since my first computer, I still tend to gravitate to “weird” systems; I’ve been puttering about with RISC-V for several years now and a lot of my spare time entertainment is futzing with core designs to run on a Terasic DE-10 nano running a Cyclone-V ARM-based FPGA.
It’s all been a really fun ride, and even as I type this on a bleeding edge ARM-based Apple Silicon M2 Max RISC machine I’m looking forward to the next weird architecture to sink my teeth into. 🙂
Listening to "New Horizons" by Timecop1983