[Info-vax] Alpha Personal Workstation question

[Paul Sture]

On Fri, 10 Aug 2012 01:10:46 +0200, Michael Kraemer wrote:

> Mazzini Alessandro schrieb:
>> Thanks for the extra infos.
> 
> I listed the working RAMs in
> http://www.gsi.de/~kraemer/COLLECTION/DEC/pws500.html
> 
>> Yep, put that way is a bit strange the self imposed limit to 2gb...
>> unless the idea was : when the client feels the need of more ram, he'll
>> buy a more expensive box from us.
> 
> Well, considering all the fuss back then about the Alpha being a 64-bit
> CPU and thus superior to all others, it would have been a much better
> marketing argument if already entry systems would have allowed to use
> RAM in excess of 4GB.
> Would have attracted more developers and followers.
> Of course system design was limited by RAM availability and pricing,
> but this means that there was not much differentiation between 32bit and
> 64bit systems at the bottom line.

I am pretty sure price was an issue, even through to the XP900 / XP1000 
era.  The PWS systems (and later XP replacements) we had at work only had 
128 MB RAM and we were told that upgrading either was cost prohibitive.

It's pity because the second hand PWS 600au with 512 MB I had at home 
brought CDE up almost instantaneously when compared with the systems at 
work.

On the subject of CDE, there's now OpenCDE which has just been released 
under GPL:

http://devio.us/~kpedersen/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/

-- 
Paul Sture