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

[Neil Rieck]

On Jul 5, 5:43 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

Another big change between VAX and Alpha was all the secondary stuff.
Open a VAX and you will see almost everything built by (or built for)
DEC including power supplies and drives. This was expensive to buy and
expensive to repair. I've still got a first generation CD-ROM drive in
an off-white metal case with a DSSI cable. It cost us $600 in 1996.

When DEC switched to Alpha, the majority of the hardware was COTS
(commodity-off-the-shelf) industry standard architecture. As a result
Alpha hardware seemed to me to be 10-20% the cost of equivalent VAX.

This may not be a fair comparison but I still remember the
installation of a new dual-host uVAX-4300 system with four drive
expansion pedestals. The complete system cost us $1.2 million
(including software). Two years later we saw the installation of a new
AlphaServer 4100 and the complete cost was $120k (IIRC). Dividing the
VAX price by two brings us down to $600k making the Alpha 20% of the
VAX cost.

But here is the kicker: Alpha systems didn't require special power or
air conditioning but were way faster. Every time we moved a user from
VAX to Alpha, the login screens flew by so quickly that clients
reported the inability to read the login messages as a bug. This also
happened when moving from a VAX-6430 (3 cpus) to a single CPU Alpha
Server 4100. Our clients were in for another surprise when we moved
them to a 2-cpu DS20e.

So for as much as I loved VAX, Alpha was were it was at.

Neil Rieck
Kitchener / Waterloo / Cambridge,
Ontario, Canada.
http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/docs/alpha_diary.html