[Info-vax] Alpha Personal Workstation question

[ChrisQ]

On 08/10/12 08:55, John Wallace wrote:

> "nowadays even a hobbyist can afford RAM in the multi-GB region, but
> alas, most Alphas don't support so much RAM."
>
> You might want to read the DTJ article I cited earlier:
> http://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/dtj/vol9num2/vol9num2art4.pdf
>
> At the time systems like the PWS were being designed, the industry
> (not just DEC) was rather different. Even if you don't understand the
> more technical stuff in the article, perhaps it will mean something to
> read that SDRAM (the technology underlying today's DRAM) hadn't really
> taken off and it wasn't clear which technology was going to come next
> after EDO DRAM (remember that?).
>
> The section headed "Technology Choices" at the bottom of page 3 of the
> PDF is relevant. Get the RAM technology choice wrong and you're
> already dead in the water. RAMBUS was looking promising on paper, and
> even got adopted in some places (e.g. away from Alpha, notably in high
> end x86 workstations from Compaq), but turned out wrong in the market.
> Hindsight is a great thing.

Good article. The as500/400 that I still have uses really odd memory:

Dimms, 5volt, fast page mode, 72 bit wide, buffered ecc. The machine had
4 dimm slots and was good for a max of 1Gb, though my machine had 4x64Mb
dimms to make 256Mb. At the time, it was a vast amount of memory compared
to the pc's of the day, or even smaller Sun machines, which quite often had
only 32 or 64Mb.

256Mb was more than enough for Tru64, and even less ran ok on the 250/4/266
machine, An even earlier Alpha, a 3000/400, had only 64Mb and seemed to
run OSF/1 v2.0 just fine. The machines would feel slow now, but we were all
so washed away by the speed of the early Alphas that a bit of swapping 
didn't
seem to matter. As you say, memory was horrendously expensive at the time
and made even more difficult to source by the lack of common standards.

>
> Improvements are always possible, but the PWS family was imo quite a
> respectable attempt at a commodity-technology Alpha box (sharing most
> of its components with the equivalent Intel box). Would have been nice
> if it had a "Halt" button, but the PCBU designed the box, and x86
> boxes don't have Halt buttons.

Quibble quibble :-). I owned a 433au for a while and they were seriously
fast machines for their time and very well thought out...

Regards,

Chris