[Info-vax] In memoriam: 10 years since Alpha's passing away.

[Michael Kraemer]

urbancamo schrieb:
> Alpha should be celebrated as a fantastic a piece of computer
> architecture whose creation clearly depended on a number of highly
> motivated, intelligent and creative people.

Certainly an interesting piece of hardware,
but just another RISC CPU after all.
And it wasn't made by elves but just ordinary people.

> The 'Intel' generation (listen to me, eh?) of Java programmers that I
> now have the pleasure of working with find it hard to believe that I
> was using a true 64-bit computer back in 1994. 

true 64-bit?
According to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_21064
("address unit")
it had only 43bit virtual and 34bit real addressing.
Not that it would have made a difference because
you couldn't stuff (let alone pay) that much RAM into those boxen.
Did later generations have really "true 64bit"?

> Back then 250 Mhz
> processors were a *seriously* big deal in the workstation market.

Big deal?
according to
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_1995_March_21/ai_16682121/
DEC ranked only fourth (after Sun, HP and IBM, respectively)

> I feel grateful for living and working with computers in such exciting
> times.

yes, times were more "interesting" back then.