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

[urbancamo]

On Jul 5, 10:43 pm, Hans Vlems <hvl... at freenet.de> wrote:
> 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

Hey, a bit of positivity never did anyone any harm, eh?

When evaluating hardware back then the DEC knocked spots off the
competition for the price point I was looking at (approx. GBP 10k)
It was a big deal to *me* having a 250MHz processor to do
visualization with, at least, and the 512-bit memory bandwidth came in
very handy too...

Yes, and of course the ability to process data in 64 bit chunks
natively is more what I was getting at, rather than having a 64-bit
address bus that you
could never use. Hey, I had 64MB and that was a fairly impressive
amount of RAM in 1994!

Have you ever tried doing 64 bit floating point on a VAX using MACRO.
No, me neither - it was just too much of a PITA.

Regards, Mark