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

[Hans Vlems]

On 5 jul, 11:34, Michael Kraemer <M.Krae... at gsi.de> wrote:
> 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 tohttp://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 tohttp://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_1995_March_21/ai_16682...
> 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.

The VAX was a _true_ 32 bit architecture, right?
VMS ran in 32 bit mode on that platform from day 1, right?
How many VAX models could have 4 GB main memory in their memory banks?
Only the latest models is the answer. Memory was just too expensive,
proprietary as it was.
I think an AlphaServer 1200 with, say, 1 TB would have been equally
expensive even though
it used "standard" memory.
Hans