[Info-vax] RealWorldTech on Poulson
Paul Sture
paul.nospam at sture.ch
Tue Jul 5 08:13:03 EDT 2011
In article
<db641605-1816-415e-9a4b-109629d4eca5 at v12g2000vby.googlegroups.com>,
John Wallace <johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> On Jul 4, 3:08 pm, Paul Sture <paul.nos... at sture.ch> wrote:
> >
> > Alpha did indeed have a lot going for it. My PWS is 600 MHz and
> > according to my interpretation of the serial number was manufactured in
> > Feb/Mar 1997. In March 1997 I was in the market for an Intel box, and
> > my supplier recommended I go for a two x 133 MHz cpu configuration since
> > that would be cheaper than a single "latest and greatest" 200 MHz cpu.
> >
> > Three times the speed of the fastest Intel offering.
> >
> > > However, it was tied to a company that was sinking, which is a part of
> > > what made it fail.
> >
> > Prices cannot have helped. I don't know what my Alpha PWS cost new, but
> > we did find an old advert for one at USD 20,000 (spec unknown, so not
> > necessarily a true guide). My well specced Intel box cost a fraction of
> > that (circa GBP 4K).
> >
>
> I'm sure you already know this, but please don't compare based on MHz
> alone.
Indeed, though in the 1990s I got a bit swayed by Intel's heavy use of
clock speed in marketing. I'd forgotten about this but I did some
simple benchmarks in 1993 between my humble VS2000 and a brand new PC in
order to prove that clock speed was not everything. I proved the point.
> By the time the DIGITAL Personal Workstation(433, 500 and 600MHz,
> fwiw) came out, the basic prices were reasonably competitive compared
> with similarly configured UNIX workstations from other vendors (sorry,
> no references right now).
>
> There was also an Intel PWSi in a similar NLX-format system which was
> intended to compete with other vendors Intel-based workstations (from
> 266MHz, fwiw).
>
> The entry level PWS/Alpha prices depended on whether you wanted to be
> able to run just NT/Alpha, or pay a bit more (and probably install a
> bit more memory and disk) and run VMS and/or UNIX (Tru64). $20K
> sounds well high end (huge quantity of memory? fast SCSI disks?).
My used PWS came with 2 NICs, 512 MB RAM and Ultrawide SCSI so yes. At
work we had to suffer 128 MB RAM in our PWS systems, and still had only
that amount when upgraded to XP 900 or 1000 systems,
--
Paul Sture
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