[Info-vax] Alpha Ready System Upgrade

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2015-05-12 19:39:49 +0000, johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk said:

> 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.

ps: The VAX 7000 Laser and VAX 10000 Blazer server upgrades were a 
processor board swap, though some customers might opt to swap the whole 
server due to downtime or parallel use or whatever.  Most of the guts 
of the Laser and Blazer were compatible across VAX and Alpha, though 
some of the I/O widgets did require a field reload of different 
firmware as part of the upgrade.

The Systems and Options Catalog (SoC) "upgrades" section had details on 
the various offers and options.

Again, AFAIK, the Alpha upgrades of all of the VAX 4000, VAX 6000, and 
all earlier VAX systems were all box swaps.  "Alpha Ready" or some such 
wording was used in the marketing.


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