[Info-vax] Chinese Alpha?

[Hans Vlems]

On 2 mei, 13:38, Paul Sture <p... at sture.ch> wrote:
> On Wed, 02 May 2012 03:21:19 -0700, Hans Vlems wrote:
> > No, it's an EV5 manufactured in a process designed to produce the EV6
> > generation.
> > The EV56 is found in the Alpha Server 1200 and 4100 series, among
> > others, and in the latter ran at its highest clockspeed of 600 MHz
> > (IIRC).
> > In 1998 you'd surely have been impressed (given what Intel was doing
> > with the Pentium II and III at the time). Today it is of interest to
> > hobbyists like me ;-)
>
> I bought a Pentium at the beginning of 1997 when 200 MHz was the latest
> offering (I was advised to go for a twin cpu 133 MHz configuration
> instead because that was substantially cheaper).
>
> If I have interpreted the serial number correctly, my PWS 600au was made
> in week 9 of 1997, putting it in the same time frame as my Pentium.
>
> Alpha was streets ahead of Intel at the time. It definitely wasn't cheap
> though.  I did find a price of 20,000 USD for an Alpha 600au in that era,
> but there wasn't a detailed listing of the configuration, so cannot say
> definitively how much more expensive than the Pentium of the day they
> were.
>
> --
> Paul Sture

Exactly my point Paul. The problem with US commercial thinking is that
"better equals cheaper".
Occasionally a good product demands a higher pricetag. Digital built
quality equipment and sold it at
a higher pricelevel than the competition. That quality allows me to
run VAX systems that are 20 years
old and these systems keep on going. The same applies for Alpha
systems and apparently we've all
clearly forgotten the awe when we first saw an Alpha booting VMS and
the speed our (VESTed!) applications
ran at! I remember the reactions of users of a library catalogue
program. It was written in Business Basic, an
interpreted language. I had VESTed the interpreter and the program ran
on an Alpha Server 2100/190.
On the VAX 6420 it took minutes just to display the program banner and
even more to get a command prompt.
On Alpha it was instantaneous. Users were sure the system was
faulty.... Everything worked well however and
two weeks later the users were quite used to the new performance.
The potential for Alpha in 1998 was enormous. Provided its owner was
willing to sink a lot of money in continuous
development and could find buying custumers willing to spend the
money. Customers vote with their wallets and
the alection was won by Intel's 64 bit incarnation of the Pentium
line. Dirt cheap and none of the systems based
on that technology last longer than 7 years.
Hans