Re: DEC alphas

["Richard Stevenson" <nospam [at] adv.net.nz>]

On 26 Mar 2000, at 23:43, Andrew Basterfield wrote:

> It would be nice to get hold of an older 21164 & AlphaPC 164 / 164SX / 164LX
> but it looks like it's gonna cost megabucks unless you strike it lucky on
> the second hand market. 

Indeed, you'd have to be *very* lucky.  Even old 100mHz Alphas from the 
university I used to work at were pressed into service there - they just 
never stop.  I had one driving a CD burner after it was written off and 
removed from the asset register.  The sysadmins there *never* let an Alpha 
go, not even the TurboChannel ones, and they can't even run Linux.

> Soddit it'll prolly be cheaper to buy a sparc
> http://www.speedie.co.uk/sun.htm back in my hometown of Brum
> 
> at least you get the benefit of not being able to run NT4 :)

<g>  Yeah, but it's been a long time since Sparc (or even UltraSparc) were 
even close to "fast".  We had a single-CPU Alpha DS20 running Seti [at] Home 
before it was commissioned, and it was rocking up the .nz Seti [at] Home chart  
:-))  If only we could have gotten our grubby mitts on a T3E one of the 
government departments had installed.  I think it had 256 Alphas in it.  
Sigh.

Cheers

R

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