[Info-vax] Alpha Ready System Upgrade

[johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk]

On Tuesday, 12 May 2015 15:05:48 UTC+1, Stephen Hoffman  wrote:
> On 2015-05-12 13:48:07 +0000, Bob Koehler said:
> 
> > In article <5551321c$0$64021$b1db1813$2411a48f at news.astraweb.com>, JF 
> > Mezei <jfmezei.spamnot at vaxination.ca> writes:
> >> On 15-05-11 18:33, mcleanjoh at gmail.com wrote:
> >> 
> >>> Vax is hardware.  Alpha is hardware.  Ergo "Vax Alpha" doesn't make 
> >>> much sense to people familiar with VMS.
> >> 
> >> Wasn't there one VAX model that was sold as being upgradable to an 
> >> Alpha?  (I guess board swap).
> > 
> >    There were more than one VAX 4000 qbus models sold as upgradeable to 
> > Alpha.  No such upgrade was ever produced.
> 
> Interesting.   I don't recall that case; a VAX 4000 Q-bus that was sold 
> as being upgradable to Alpha short of a box-swap.  There was the 
> rarely-seen but still available VAX 4000 model 50 upgrade for some 
> Q-bus boxes, and there were Q-bus expansions for various VAX 4000 model 
> 1xx seres boxes, but AFAIK all of the non-box-swap upgradable VAX 
> systems were among the VAX 7000 and VAX 10000 series.   Not the VAX 
> 4000 series.  Have any more details on that Alpha-upgradable VAX 4000?
> 
> 
> -- 
> Pure Personal Opinion | HoffmanLabs LLC

Some VAX 4000 models were sold with the assurance of an "upgrade to Alpha
in the future", see e.g.
http://www.compaq.com/alphaserver/vax/archive/vax4000_100.html

In this case upgrade presumably meany get a good deal on an Alpha when
you trade in your VAX 4000-100, 'cos there's not much hardware they'd
have in common.

Similar "Alpha Ready System Upgrade" offers were also available with
the 3100 Model 80/90:
http://www.compaq.com/cpq-alphaserver/vax/archive/mv3100_3040_8090.html

The relevant upgrades were to desktop Alpha systems.

There was an similar upgrade program for VAX 7000/10000 systems, which
offered an upgrade to a datacentre-class Alpha system:
http://www.compaq.com/alphaserver/vax/archive/vax7000_600.html

This is the kind of upgrade that would frequently be called a "fork lift"
upgrade but that terminology doesn't really seem right for a 3100 or a 
4000-100.

Not sure whether the 7000/10000 upgrades involved a total box swap - in principle they wouldn't need to, would they, but sometimes it was useful
to arrange for things like parallel running and you just end up shipping
in a new system and in due course returning the old one.

I'm going from what I remember of Customer Update articles and such. The
relevant ones don't seem to be easily findable online. Corections welcome.