[Info-vax] Alpha Personal Workstation question

[Michael Kraemer]

ChrisQ schrieb:

> Good article. The as500/400 that I still have uses really odd memory:
> 
> Dimms, 5volt, fast page mode, 72 bit wide, buffered ecc.

Yep, this type of RAM is almost impossible to find nowadays it seems.
Istr some odd RS/6000 models of that era (40P) use the same kind.
It took me several years to spot humble extra 4x64MB for my 500/266,
and I'm still looking for more. Problem is, that always 4 modules
of the same kind are needed.
My AS has 8 RAM slots, btw, and the 4x32MB it came with simply
weren't enough to run CDE plus apps.

> 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.

This would depend less on the machine's capability, but
more on how much the respective owner wanted to spend.
AS500's are from approx 1996, contemporary Suns would have been
SparcStation 20s or so, which can also take 512MB.
Often enough one bought machines only with the minimum amount
of RAM directly from the vendor, and added extra memory
from Kingston et al., depending on one's needs.
But here we are talking already about the mid (not early) 1990's,
and just 32 or 64MB simply weren't enough.

> 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 OS maybe, but how about apps?
64MB would have been the minimum.
The AXP 3000s I have inherited from that era
all had more, 160MB to 192MB.

> 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. 

I'd say, if you need to swap a lot, it wouldn't
matter what kind of CPU you have inside,
nor if it has 32 or 64 bits.

> As you say, memory was horrendously expensive at the time
> and made even more difficult to source by the lack of common standards.

Well, you always could order it from the vendor,
but you paid a fortune. Usually you bought OEM RAM.
Of course the vendors knew that.
I remember an on site DEC techie who was surprised when
we called him to put some extra *original* RAM into
a workstation.


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

At least the RAM slots are reasonably easy to access ...