DEC Alpha Personal Workstation 433a
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 2 ต.ค. 2024
- In this video we are going to be talking about the DEC Alpha Personal Workstation 433a, a computer that was donated to me by a subscriber in a non-working condition.
This is not your standard x86 class machine but this one uses a DEC Alpha CPU.
After looking at the hardware in more detail and getting her up and running again, I'm going to be installed Windows NT 4.0 Server on to it, an OS from microsoft that has support for these Alpha CPUs
#DEC #Alpha #Retro
I spent almost 20 years at Dec I started there in 1974 what an awesome experience it was. I worked on The PDP 8, 10 and 11, but spent most my career in the networks division. Ken Olson was a great guy it’s really to bad he got booted for Palmer who chopped the company up and sold it off piecemeal. Any way the Alpha chip was a phenomenal design out of the Hudson site. The graphics for the movie Titanic were generated using Alpha workstations. This video really warmed my heart being a DEC engineer. Many great memories and friends.
We had a fairly large install at Airservices Australia - PDPs, VAXes and Alphas. We had 500 Alphaservers at one stage - running radars, and flight management. Also had HEAPS of these Alpha workstations - they rocked.. HEaps of them ran Windows NT, but the main go for us admins was VMS. Lots of clusters - lots and lots and lots of databases - heaps of graphics stations.
All gone now - all Windows and Linux PCs.
I might be wrong, but those long PCI slots look like 64-bit PCI slots to me. I think I saw them on older HP Proliant servers.
That's correct. 😊
They are indeed.
Yup. You can even get gigabit-ethernet cards for PCI-x. I still have one somewhere…
Yep, owned an older proliant and can confirm too.
So it had a bus speed up to 533 MB/s (compared to 32bits who only could reach 266 MB/s at 66MHz)
Exactly, pci-x slots, they were used for scsi and network cards
Now that's a proper workstation.
Alpha was cool, I miss these sorts of interesting workstation computers. Things are a lot more boring these days.
I picked up a SPARCstation that I'm about to bring up. Used to have a couple Alphas, but I lost them at some point.
IBM Power9 is a thing now IIRC
There was always something mystical about the Alpha. However on the upside we now have things like threadrippers!
Back in the late 90s, I used to work at a pre-orders graphics company in the proofing area. We had a pair of dual processor Alpha Servers running NT Server, acting as high capacity/high speed rips for the image setters. Basically, massive laser printers, but instead instead of printing a positive image on paper stock, these sedan sized boxes burned a negative image of dots on film that were made into plates for web presses before they went digital. There would usually be 4 plates, CMYK, but on occasion an added special colour would be needed (process blue or process red maybe silver, or whatever the client specified). Each film was output from the image setter on a 3 foot by X size. X being anywhere from 1 foot all the way up to the length of the film roll. Needless to say, the typical film plate was saved as raw image data, taking up hundreds of GB of drive space.
I worked the midnight shift and was the only person who knew how to operate windows nt. The others were strictly mac operators.
I think I still have a faded "The Last Alpha" tee shirt from when our plant was bought by intel.
Little bit of trivia that I remember being talked about back in the day: The original AMD K7 Athlon borrowed its EV6 bus from DEC/Alpha
And some later Alpha mainboards use AMD chipsets.
The leading team that developed the Athlon were ex DEC employees.
I've been a fan of AMD since the beginning. Love them through thick and thin. So nice to see them punching back at Intel once again.
Also we partly owe the existence of Ethernet to DEC, they were one of the three companies to co-create it and the company to make it a commercial success.
Iirc amd shoplifted engineers from dec and got in legal hot water for it as well due to trade secret violations
The Alpha team also screened into the photolith in Cyrillic "Alpha . when you care enough to steal the very best" ..and the couterfeit russian chips included it.
Hi. Still run some of these, ES40 and TS10 at home. If you're considering benchmarking, careful. A lot of the WinNT installation is actually i386 running under emulation. If I may make a suggestion, try a common operating system that runs natively on both systems you want to compare (eg the PPro you mentioned), NetBSD which will run natively on both. There's also a lot of benchmarks in the NetBSD pkgsrc collection. Then you're comparing apple with apples. Also the "combo" slots you mentioned are 33mhz 64bit PCI slots. So you've a few 32bit PCI, some 16bit ISA and some 64bit PCI. Quite common even in x86 servers of the age and apple smurf-towers such as the B&W G3 through to the digital audio...etc. Additionally, there is multiple operating systems supported by DEC which were NT4 and 2000 RC2? RC3? .. OSF/1 UNIX and older Digital UNIX, Tru64, and of course the most interesting is OpenVMS. Apart from WintendoNT .. nothing else uses the "AlphaBIOS" which is ARCS compatible losely as used on SGI's and other systems. The other side of the BIOS world is "SRM" which is where the fun starts and is required for OpenVMS and Tru64. :) Nice video.
Thx a lot for the elaborate comment ! Still a lot to discover with this one .... unfortunately time is limited :) but have more plans with this machine. Hope you stick around to find out.
@@RetroSpector78 Absolutely. You're one of my favorite channels. Indeed. These are an extremely versatile family of computers that were buried alive by HP at the behest of intel after the failed project Monterrey. When HP did ship the ia64 systems, the last AXP systems still outran them till they re-defined the benchmark to have a multi-core ia64 beating a single core system. Good times.
I like the idea of VMS(OpenVMS) That kind of open isn't great because it isn't open at all.
@@asanjuas Well, originally it was just called VMS from '78 onwards. The "Open" part is because around 1990 (?) at v5.5 if memory serves .. they wanted to support the "Open Systems" standards and implemented and passed one of the early POSIX compliance tests for C function call and return types to make porting from various UNIX and UNIX-wannabe's. Now, with my tongue firmly in my cheek, I was oft told by people with longer beards than mine that whilst it's spelt "OpenVMS" the first part of that is a silent vulgar vowel and the pronunciation is mostly similar to "VMS". :)
We had a room full of SparcStations and a room full of DEC Alpha systems at uni ... everyone usually went for the Sparc machines but I adored the Alpha's, so much faster and more responsive.
Neat system!
They definitely were serious about EMI compliance, with gaskets on almost every edge... Wouldn't expect any less from DEC
Ferrites on a bunch of cables too, even the bundle from the front panel switches lol
This brings backs memories, as I managed a number of those many years ago back when Compaq had purchased the brand (Tru64 based instead of NT, though). The Alpha platform was really ahead of its time. It eventually died, like all the other propietary server/workstation architectures, unable to compete against dirt cheap and ubiquituous Linux boxes.
@RTPSEV IBM's AIX is still being developed and sold. v7.2 just came out in the last 12 months. New Power9 hardware and new software features to boot. Sadly HP-UX v3 hasn't had an update in many many years, merely patch rollups.. and we know what happened to Solaris now that Oracle's not-so-quietly abandoned it. I wonder if any of the older licensee's such as Fujitsu and Hitachi could do something with it?
"Now you can have only 2 flavors of Linux..."
My Slackware workstations say: "huh?"
@RTPSEV Not sure where the ZFS came in.. yeah. I was an early adopter with Sol10u5? u6? ... it was utterly heaven till it wasn't. I've had to rescue about a dozen ZFS systems over the years and retrieve data. I really still want to love ZFS, but don't use it unless I have to. Fortunately the old SPARC64's I work on are all logged UFS, and the requirement for linux is JFS-or-die. I've yet to have JFS treat me badly. I also would love to love XFS due to my SGI obsession, and whilst it's not let me down on SGI gear, I've had a number of linux boxes bricked and especially due to one nasty bug on SnapAppliances back around. ... 2012?? (thinking back) when they all auto-corrupted once the used extents went past about 500-512gb. Nasty stuff and they were left in an un-patchable state because the company went fut. It was fun to go back to a place I worked at years later to do data retrieval on a Snap Appliance cluster that I warned against buying and decided to die in my absense. It was the hardest "I told you so" I've managed to avoid. heh
@darak2 Actually.. HP buried the DEC/Compaq assets alive. Think about it for a moment. When they got compaq, they had two processor architectures.. PA-RISC & AXP, Two UNIX's (HP-UX and Tru64), and two mid-range O/S's (OpenVMS and MPE/iX). The R&D to keep two of everything going would've been utterly crazy financially. So they jettisoned Tru64, MPE/iX, AXP, PA-RISC, decided ia64 was definitely the way to go, port VMS to Itanium and port bits of HP-UX also and run the rest under the PA-RISC Aries emulator. Wouldn't have been easy choices. Pity they didn't finish the x86-64 HP-UX port that came out after the Oracle trial now that VSI is porting OpenVMS to x86-64 (yay!) .. HP-UX is orphaned.
I want to see DOOM running!
good idea :)
Doom was not cool, but with sp6 of nt yeah why not nfs3? But seriously VMS is better
Sounds reasonable....though an installation of a workstation edition of NT 4.X would be a better fit..
You can run Windows 3.1 emulated on OpenVMS :)
Yes! And Quake too. Maybe Quake II too.
Ha! Haven't seen anyone install the Gopher service in a while.
Loved the Alphas, but they never caught on and I was left with the old boring Intel servers for decades. :)
I loved working with Alpha hardware. Fast, dependable as a rock and extremely flexible.
This brings back some memories, in college I bought a bare bones 21164a 533mhz system to use as a Quake multiplayer server. Wish I still had that box, had a lot of fun with it. Part of my adventures with it resulted in me getting a Windows 2000 Workstation Beta 2 disc. It includes an x86 emulation layer, so I was able to do dumb things like run Starcraft on my workstation. If you want to give it a try on your machine let me know. I *think* Alpha support was kept up to Release Candidate 1 of Win 2k so there might be later versions that could be tracked down? Also, my machine was a decent overclocker, 666mhz stable all day long, might be worth seeing if you can push yours a bit?
Win 2k RC2 runs fine on those boxes and it's available from WinWorldPC. While on NT4 you need DEC/Compaq FX!32 to run x86 apps, in Win2k it was indeed going to be bolted into the OS. (Trivia: the "Program Files (x86)" folder was born on Windows for Alpha CPUs)
The slots that "look like a mix of PCI and ISA" are PCI-X slots, and depending by version work with standard PCI cards too.
Also these workstations can run Tru64 UNIX or OpenVMS (except DEC Multia, if we don't count the workaround), but you need another firmware in place of the AlphaBIOS
I think he's referring to the slots where there's a PCI and an ISA slot in the same position, and would share the same slot opening in the back panel. Motherboards that had both usually had one or 2 slots that were either PCI or ISA, but this one has 3 slots that can be either. It works because PCI has the connector on the "top" side of the back panel slot, whereas ISA as the connector on the "bottom" side of the slot. I'm sure PCI was designed that way from the get go so that slots could have either connector.
The beauty of the PWS in the alpha world is both SRM and ARC are in the firmware and you can soft switch between them without flashing anything, even on the low-end PWS 433a.
I would want to see a bit of typical work that should have been done on a machine like this. Something like 5 minutes of Digital Alpha user's life.
Stick around .... still have plans with this one ... but time and resources are limited unfortunately :)
17:13 m68k CPU spotted on that optical network card :)
Nice catch
I loved Dec Alpha systems back in the day, especially running Linux on them. Wonderful machines.
Nice addition to your collection! That CPU alone goes for around 100 U.S Dollars on Ebay, cant imagine how valuable the other parts are. I thought that the SCSI cable was going to be like that magic trick with the scarfs...it just kept coming out, how long was that thing? Some viewers like to see the case being cleaned and refurbished, its like ASMR....LOL. Terrific Video, thank you!
P.S. The i386 emulation is actually stored in the PALcode which is part of the AlphaBIOS. So the macro-code representing the i386 emulation to RISC translation is located there.
Nice. These things smoked all the machines of its day. I worked for an ISP in the late 90s and we used all AlphaServers 533's for our various server daemons. There was really only two options. NT 4 or Linux. There was hardly *any* 64 bit support back then. Even Windows was limited to only the binaries it came with unless you were lucky and found 64 bit Windows software back then. Fortunately the portability of Linux at the time was what made running Redhat 4 on that sucker my only real option for what we needed. But man I loved working on them. Especially since the rest of the office workers were using meager AMD K6-2's hehehe.
DEC: "Let's abandon Alpha and jump on the Itanium bandwagon!"
Also DEC: (gets sold for scrap)
I might be wrong here, but I think it was Compaq who jumped onto the Itanium bandwagon: basically Intel bought the whole DEC CPU division from Compaq (except for PDP-11s which went to Mentec) and wiped off its top competitor.
@@ghost23247 Alpha and x86 were both notable in the fact that they were the only two little-endian architectures in a world of big-endian architectures, so there was some synergy. But yes, the fact that HP ended up owning DEC would have been unthinkable had the Compaq deal not happened in between. In any case, I was really happy to see Itanium fail where AMD-64 succeeded, and now the cross-licensing agreements between Intel and AMD will forever be symbiotic.
(And I've always been a fan of AMD.)
@@igfoobar Thank god, Intel would've achieved world domination otherwise and we wouldn't be able to buy any "IA64" CPU for less than a thousand bucks. It's a bit sad though, Itanium wasn't a bad CPU after all, it was a very interesting concept: we could really have large-scale manycore VLIWs in the server/HPC market today if HP/Intel had pursued the design, probably.
@@ghost23247 Itanium was like Micro Channel, a technically good design but built with the intention to recapture what had become a competitive market.
no that was HP after buying out DEC. DEC was Alpha right up till the end when they got bought out by HP. HP was the one with the hard on For Itanium
The "combined slots" are PCI-X (PCI-eXtended) slots, supporting up to 64-bit and running at 133MHz respectively up to 533MHz as of V2 (no smartypants.. I looked it up on Wiki)
How time goes by... 8- and 16-bit ISA, 32-bit EISA, Microchannel, PCI, PCI-X, Vesa, AGP, PCI-e x4/8/16... did I forget anything?
I worked briefly for DEC back in the time this Workstation came out. My tech center at DEC Augusta,Maine received a number of these to test out and use. I found them quite a step up from the mainframe servers we were using at the time. Brings back fond memories. Unfortunately, shortly afterwards, the factory was sold to SCI,Inc along with the people ;/
Hi Dave don’t know if you remember me from Augusta and SCI days I work the from 74 until about 94 before leaving SCI to go back to DEC in Littleton, MA where I stayed until the networks group was sold off to Cabletron, just before Palmer sold the Hudson and the Alpha plant to Intel and then the rest to Compaq.
This great piece of hardware run Debian Linux pretty well, I guess.
I have to disagree there. I had a DEC AS800 setup as a cross compile running Red Hat many years ago and Tru64 crapped all over Linux on Alpha. It was just dog slow in comparison. I generally ran OpenVMS, Tru64 or NetBSD on my Alpha's.
Those are 64bit PCI slots.
I would really like to get myself a Dec Alpha but they have silly prices on Fleabay
Just realized I saw an "X86 BIOS Emulation Copyright DEC & Microsoft" in the about section of the AlphaBIOS. That's incredible and amazingly powerful. I had no idea this thing looked like a regular IBM compatible to expansion cards. That's really really cool.
Thanks for the video! It could be better if you will show it again with DEC Unix with CDE. Looking forward!
Might just do that ... have some plans for this one.
@@RetroSpector78 Great! Looking forward! Thanks!
Linux! this would be perfect for Linux! you would find a lot more software for your machine that way.
Planning on doing some unix / linux stuff with it .... time ... time ... time ....
The other slots are probably PCI 64 bits or PCI-X which are backwards compatible with PCI 32 bit (you can place a 64-bit PCI-X cad on a typical PCI slot). These were very popular on servers back in the time.
I'd love to see some games of the time. I wonder how fast was x86 emulation build into Windows NT on non-x86 platforms. And maybe see how well does it perform with native ports of Doom or Quake.
I've got one of these up in the loft somewhere. I didn't have NT so I put SUSE Linux on it. These workstations were the business back in the day. I still have some of the sales doc showing how much faster they were than the competition (mainly Sun & HP) at some of the major CAD apps. Fond memories of my days in DEC!
I bid on one of these on ebay many years back. I love old systems (I have a Sun SS20 dual 85MHz machine, for example) and I was going to be able to get it for around $270 (back in '99 or '00, not sure), but I got sniped by 25 cents right at the last second.. I was the only bidder. :( Never had a chance to get one I could afford again. I heard that these workstations could compile the linux kernel much faster than intel or amd pc's at the time, but I never got a chance to find out. (fun(?) fact: it took just over 24 hours for my dual 85MHz machine to compile world on a netbsd install, I think I have a screenshot somewhere).
You were special if you had access to a 433Mhz Alpha in 1996. Today, we're all equal.
You can switch to the SRM firmware (used for linux, bsd, tru64 and vms) just by changing a setting in alphabios (and you can switch back with the "arc" command at the srm prompt)... the actual flash chip contains both. NT4/alpha had very little software, but linux is quite usable as a majority of things have been compiled for it.
You can put 1.5gb of ram in this, although it's quite picky about what ram it will work with...
There's a beta version of win2k for alpha that runs on this too, it doesn't need the HAL floppy as it has it built in.
The 64bit pci slots were buggy on the earlier version of the personal workstations, there was a later revision which had a different ide controller with usb support that fixed the pci bug too.
The paired pentium/alpha power connectors were because they made (or planned to?) an x86 version where the top board was different but everything else remained unchanged.
There were a and au versions, the a shipped with nt while the au shipped with unix or vms, the au always came with a scsi controller whereas it was optional on the a.
My best friend had one of those, might be the same model. He couldn't remember but watching the video, he confirmed it was same model. I was totally jealous as it blew away my Pentium Pro.
I recall being mightily impressed by the Alpha's architecture.. in comparison with the Motorola 680x0 I was used to, the Alpha looked like a Rolls Royce.
I had a similar issue with the power button on a Vectra Lately.
You never stated how you actually got this DEC Alpha Personal Workstation 433a to power-up. You went from disassembly to running. What fixed the power-up problem?
It was the power button that was stuck in the “off” position. The problem is not yet fixed but is diagnosed :) for the moment the computer is now stuck in the “on” position. Looking at replacing the power button.
I love this video! I just traded some parts for an Alphastation 500 333 and an ATX alpha board :)
Yeah interesting machine .... now need to figure out what to do with it next ... see if I can do some useful benchmarking / install some software on NT, or checkout the Alpha Unix landscape.
@@RetroSpector78 not sure if I have you on facebook. maybe contact me so we can share info!
thanks for works. i want see This machine on the gaming and app working on winnt.
The long white slots are PCI-X.
I find it really fascinating how the engineers had the foresight to design an I/O daughterboard that apparently was platform-agnostic, could be mated to either an Alpha or Pentium mainboard. The power supply appears to be a mostly standard ATX unit, everything else is standard.
Not quite true regarding NT 4.0 being the last MS OS for these things. Windows 2000 was at the RC point when the project for Alpha was canned and there are a couple of versions out there of it. i also have an archive of the old alphant.com site which had a lot of Alpha based windows software. You could also get versions of Alpha software on the old MS "Select" CDroms. Also you could run either Tru64 or OpenVMS by swapping over from the NT firmware to SRM (easy to do) so long as you had a supported video card. The Compaq XP1000 was the last of these tower systems but had a much faster CPU. Also, DEC had a really cool technology called fx!32 which could do binary translation of Intel x86 apps for Alpha NT.
Interesting and cool feature the intel x86 translation in hardware
I had one of these, although mine was the model that couldn't boot Windows NT. It had Tru-64, Digital's proprietary Unix, installed on it when I acquired it. I later installed Debian Linux and used it as my main machine for several years until I got quad G5 Apple Mac (another decommissioned machine from my job). The Mac also ran Linux, until I finally switched to an Intel based laptop a couple of years ago.
Windows NT had versions for Alpha and mips. I used to dual boot mine. Tru64 or WinNT.
Like to see? VMS in action
Absolutely, but not sure if this has SRM
@@boardernut the only problem observed is with the cd drive it needs a kind of special cd, for the rest vms is downloadable from winworldpc
This would be an awesome Linux retro rig.
Wow, that thing was way over engineered!
Can it run linux or maybe some exotic OS designed for the Alpha architecture?
Officially Digital UNIX, OpenVMS and Microsoft Windows NT operating systems. Haven’t looked at unofficial / exotic stuff yet :) will try to get unix on it.
Did you try using the video card in a non-DEC system, like an x86?
These are 64-bit PCI-X slots.
@5:50, that DIN connector is for olde-schoole LCD shutter glasses. You are correct in that they are for 3D.
It's always fun to see Windows running on a non-x86 device. I'd be interested to see what software you could actually run on NT4 Alpha.
Planning on a follow up .... just need to find some time.
Back in the day this machine was used for a specific task. It must be better for some applications... If i had to guess i would say 3D-CAD ... It would be nice to find out the purpose of this machine back then, get the programs wich were running and compare it to a Intel machine in terms of computational power.
No OpenVMS? What a pitty :(
I had a 533MHz alpha, first ran Linux and later Tru64 Unix.
Planning on doing some Unix stuff with it , but not sure if all of the cards are compatible ... will need to check and do my homework.
FX!32 might be interesting to see it do a binary recompile of x86 instructions to native Alpha. I think you can run it over and over and it keeps reoptimizing the code.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FX!32
That being said, what a horrible design of the system unit. An absolute pain. I wouldn't touch that thing with a 10' FDDI cable.
PCI based Alphas had an x86 emulation mode that kicked in first that initialized the cards, so you could use a video card with an x86 bios chip, and I assume for the SCSI as well. That would explain why it did 2 separate bios routines.
Now that is a machine worth collecting, not that x86 rubbish
Would not go so far as saying they are rubbish ... just different :) also got a lotta love for my xt, 286, 386, 486, pentium systems...
@@RetroSpector78 oh I didn't want to offend you:) but x86 is from architectural point of view.. well... rubbish;)
Peter Stalin hehe no issue :) not offended at all :) see what you mean ...
NetBEUI. Gopher. Now that really is some retro stuff!
Sure is ... had been a long time since I did an nt4 install :) Fun to do it again.
I somehow lost two AlphaStations during the past 20 years. No idea where they went. But it's the DECstation that I lost that I really wish I had.
There was another variation of these systems that were AU instead of A, and they could run Tru64 UNIX and OpenVMS. You can convert an A to AU by swapping in compatible cards, for example the qlogic scsi needs to be replaced with an LSI/Symbios card, and there are other issues like which graphics card and even network cards. I think these PWS machines had large BIOS, so you can actually switch from alphabios to SRM on the fly (if it's been loaded). Some of the other machines can only run one or the other. I had a cheaper machine wish similar hardware called a PC164LX. There is a beta version of windows 2000 that will also run on these systems. And Redhat and compaq had a linux distribution for these that included libraries to allow some tru64 binaries to run.
Planning on taking a look at that .... but time was limited and don’t want to create hour long videos ... amazed people are able to commit so much time already to watching this stuff. But thanks for the pointers !
The au version actually came with the same qlogic 1040 pci card, just the scsi card was optional on the a and standard fitting on the au. The only other difference was that the au came configured for srm instead of alphabios, and had unix or vms preinstalled.
You can convert this 433a into a 433au simply by changing the os in the alphabios settings - both alphabios and srm firmwares are present by default you just have to choose which one the system starts by default. If it boots into srm by default, you can start alphabios by typing "arc".
17:30 low power version of the Motorola 68000 CPU driving that optical network card!
The longer slots are 64bit PCI-X slots, which are much faster than your standard PCI slot.
Me, I would max out the memory, and add a PCI-X SATA Card with a few xTB drives, and maybe a quad port Gigabit PCI-X card. Then toss on Gentoo Linux or FreeBSD.
But does it run Crysis?
Nice video of an Alpha DEC workstation revived! Since I was a Teen, always was curious to see one in action. Would love to see benchmarks of it vs what intel and AMD had at the time. Even perhaps some gaming as well. :)
22:09 - Hey hey hey, that's not the same CDROM that you took out! Let me guess, the Toshiba unit it came with stopped reading CDs?
I remember the Alpha on NT was one of the first systems that would remap X86 binaries to alpha binaries. I think the first x86 program I ran on Alpha was Microsoft Office
Why does a server have sound board with a power amp?
Next video just say S. C. S. I., I know English isn't your indigenous language, but the way you are saying 'Small Computer System Interface' is Killing me, Scudzy lol.
In my head it sounded like “Scuzzy” :) “Scuzzy” is the preferred way of saying it right ?
Had a 500Mhz Dec Alpha ages ago. It absolutely thrashed my 180Mhz Pentium Pro. I had Windows NT4 running Fx32 Conversion software that allows you to run x86 binaries on it. Had Office2000 running and native Alpha Corel Draw. Wish they were still around.
14:20 The board has 16 bits ISA slots, PCI and PCI-X which is like a 64bits PCI slot for cards that required higher bandwidth like SCSI and high speed network cards
Thank you so much for such interest and detailed video.
Bit saddened you didn't image the drives before overwriting
The disks were formatted by the previous owner who attempted an NT install. So there was nothing on there....
Yep, you have to install games on your NT server. Hehehe... My first IT job was in an organization that was migrating from Netware and OS/2 to Windows NT 4 Server.
To make it 'useful' you'll want SP4, the Option Pack, then SP5 (was there a 6?), Then stuff like Visual C++ 6 for the Alpha (cough winworldpc.com/product/visual-c/6x ), and you can compile or find bench tools. Visual C++ 4.0 for the Alpha is TERRIBLE. The optimizer was so hit or miss, and for me it was all misses. VC6 was GREAT but then the Alpha died with the Compaq acquisition. These were incredible machines at the time, but Intel pulled the unexpected rabbit out of their hat, that Pentium Pro was able to scale, and although they were behind the Alpha, they were significantly cheaper. You could go Alpha or wait 1-2 years for 1/5th the price.
The longer PCI slots are PCI-X slots. It was mainly used for some high end graphic cards, IDE / SCSI controllers (and towards the end of its lifespan, SATA as well). It was also specified for both 32 and 64-bits (hence why it was used in DEC workstations - DEC Alpha CPUs being RISC x64) and also removed the bus limitation of PCI bus frequency, being limited to 66 MHz, and extended it to 133 MHz.
So in short, the PCI-X bus was a 64-bit, 133 MHz extension of the PCI bus. Important to note that PCI-X supported both 3.3 and 5V cards.
I wonder what sort of software you can actually run on such an exotic machine. Sadly AutoCAD probably isn’t one of them. These sort of non-x86 NT workstations would be great for cad, yet Autodesk never really bothered after AutoCAD 13. Since version 14 it’s Wintel only. I guess good old x86 was good enough, I had to use AutoCAD 14 in the ealy 2000’s on an Toshiba Portege laptop in the early 2000’s running windows 95 when I was an intern as building engineering student and it worked reasonably well. At least was usable. At school we had NT4 based machines with AutoCAD 2000, but those where standard Pentium based machines. Somehow the market for these Risc Workstations was probably too niche to be commercially viable for a lot of software developers that these sort of machines where built for. oh, the irony..... I guess microsoft was betting on multiple horses.
Install the Windows 2000 Beta 3 which was the last bits to have Alpha code. I think that would be very neat.
Those were the days when 150MHz seemed huge! I remember visiting DEC park in Reading back in 1992 with all those massive VAXes in it. American Alpha computer was so secret that it stood behind bars inside the already restricted computer room. IMO the processor was a cheat: too expensive and not scalable. It had to to fail and it did.
I had a couple of DEC Alpha workstations from around 1999-2000 that were given to me. I ended up not doing anything with them and gave them to a coworker. I'm kind-of wishing I still had them, but I didn't have the time. :(
I tried installing that Windows NT version on qemu; it didn't work.
But I managed to install it on MIPS, which is another jaw-dropper.
about oses i hope you get a copy of open step 4.2 for pc, it's really interesting to check out as an os, but some knowladge and some advise is definelly needed to get it to work properly and in the beast way
lol 123-11111111 worked most windows NT, OFFICE and VB lol
yeah stuck with me for some reason ... must have used it a lot back in the day.
@@RetroSpector78 Agreed me too .. it seemed to activate a lot of Microsoft Keys until they brought the KMS servers into it ! I think it was an override or a bug in there encryption of the key .. lol EA used to be the same with there games for a while all A's or ABC.. in the key activated the game so funny
@@RetroSpector78 I still use VB6 to this day so funny as I dont have the key anymore and yet well type that code it it installs every time even though its a bit out dated but I a retro man as well so.. the older programs & oses are best they dont spy on you nor takes up most 50GB of drive space like VB 2019 !! LOL
Shares a lot of components (both case and electronics) with the PWS200i (Intel) systems which you can still find parts for on eBay. There is a missing captive popscrew on your case cover, along with a security eyelet on the back plate. The hinged front door is the same on the 200i as well. The motherboards for both processor types shared the small expansion boards (the NIC, for example).
The split-board design allowed them to just build a box with a standard set of interface and peripheral devices, then simply slot in the customer's choice of processor board (Intel or DEC). The common support logic such as the bridge chips, sound, and ethernet PHY, and all the expansion slots (ISA-16, PCI, PCI-X) was all on the support board, making the physical configuration easy at the factory, and making it a lot easier to port Windows NT (an OS designed by former DEC staffers) to the Alpha. All the modules were meant to be FRUs (a commonn DEC engineering practice, Field Replaceable Units). There are still cache boards and some faster Alpha CPUs available as NOS if you look carefully.
Nice to see the Alpha series version in action - I have a PWS200i (dual Pentium Pro) and PWS 266i (single), both in regular use. Beautiful, solid machines that were meant to last a long time :)
Guess it's just a workstation for running a Windows NT 4.0 Server...
What a fascinating, strange machine.
- Always wondered what those CPU screw threads connected to.
- I like how they reused PCI slots to bridge the two sections of the mainboard together. I wonder if there are any electrical/signal compatibilities or if it's just physically the same.
- Interesting that they used Intel chips while directly competing against them. I wonder if that was as a result of (or despite) their lawsuit.
- Bizarre that they only semi-integrated the sound and networking. I cant imagine why they did that instead of just using off the shelf add in cards.
- The BIOS displaying using VGA fonts more common to DOS is just weird. Love the features including self update, partitioner, and NT install,
- Nice 68k on the FDDI card.
I wanted an Alpha so bad in high school. Not sure what I thought I could do with it then, but boy did I salivate looking at pictures of them in magazines. Same with the NeXT workstations.
Hello, Nice video ! I have a DEC Alpha 600a myself but I have an error message when starting : "pc = 0x0000000000700401, un = 0xe6bf97abeefbbfff" can you help ? Thanks.
Ah, Alpha. We purchased around hundred of those in 1997(I think it was '97). By 1999 the remaining ones were reallocated as secondary machines to our animation and compositing departments, and by 2000 or 2001 all were decommissioned and scrapped. 😐
Its a MX5 (the first Miata without USB and with SCSI DMA Bug). The MiataGL was the second version without DMA SCSI Bug. It had two USB 1 ports on the back and it also runs with a 667 Mhz AXP.
congrats on your your alpha! i've been running a pws 500au as my unix box for awhile now. you can d/l alphant software and drivers from github.com/jack23247/alphant . think the guy archived the old alphant website. there's also a beta release of windows 2k than ran on alpha's (2128 rc3 i believe) that's a 120 day trial but that can be easily bypassed. but, imo, windows nt/2k does not do that alpha justice. they were 32-bit os pretending to be 64. i personally run digital unix 4.0e (last release that had the digital logo at login screen and not *ucking compcrap!) but there's also openvms, linux and all the bsd's. the downside is that there is more hardware support on alphant than with the other oses.
That's not a cool operating system, it's an aberration! These were dark times when the accountants were taking over computer purchases and forming the fiefdoms of IT. It was awful and the worst choice for a server but it was cheap and since then cheap is the only thing.
Alpha 500a ask me "please insert the disk labeled EB64+/AlphaPC64 installation floppy"..
where i can fint that file?? please help me. thnx a lot guys.."
The longer PCI slots are not a combination of ISA and PCI, they are PCI-X slots that offer increased bandwidth, typically only found on servers and high end workstations of the period. If memory serves they were typically used for things like advanced SCSI controllers, high speed network adapters and advanced workstation graphics cards.
IBM Pallete DAC on the video card. Great for reducing the amount of Video RAM. I remember that they had some models that had the CPU and a couple extra sockets for CISC chips.
Why didn’t you just spray that sticky power button, replace SCSI cable first.?? But thanks for complete disassembly for us.
Wow, thanks for the trip back in time - I felt like I was right there in it again- Good times.
I agree that it's not a computer until it runs doom ! But I love the old architecture of the older computer layouts. A dual slot is nothing I've seen before. iso and pci? cool... I started with the old, But not forgotten Tandy 1000 and IBM 5150's. My brother insisted that I could not install a hard drive on the tandy, I had a scsi card and drive and got the tandy up and bootin" , not exactly fast but I did it. Live large and perspire...
Welcome to workstation-land!
Thx ... a fun machine to poke around .... still thinking about what to do with it :)
RetroSpector78 you can convert fat to NTFS later on
@@RetroSpector78 Repaint it, refirbish it and load some OS's! Multiboot if possible.
Redhat Linux 6.2 Alpha.. That is what I want to see or TrueUnix64 which was made specifically for the Alpha 64bit cpu.