> For those not familiar with the DEC Alpha, it always ran what was basically a hypervisor/microkernel in firmware (called PAL code). Gosh, I never realized, a

> For those not familiar with the DEC Alpha, it always ran what was basically a hypervisor/microkernel in firmware (called PAL code). Gosh, I never realized, as a former Keeper of Alphas for scientific work, previously dependent on the GEC 4000 series <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEC_4000> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEC_4000> for physics. I wonder how it compared with OS4000 Nucleus. The 4000s made competing VAXen look a bit silly for our sort of data acquisition and analysis. Since they were pretty important for my publication record, it always amuses me to see microkernel-ish systems rejected out of hand. A colleague disproved the conventional wisdom that you needed a "spectrum database" to manage the data by just trusting the filesystem to manage directories. More recently I recall userspace filesystems being called generally toys (?), notwhithstanding huge, high performance PVFS2 installations, for instance. > The DEC Alpha was a powerhouse in its day Yes, and tragically under-appreciated in my sphere. I tried in vain to get the maintainer of the principal data reduction program in a different field to replace the bottleneck of the disk-based sort (written for a PDP-11). Each image would normally fit in cache and the whole dataset largely in memory, but that somehow wasn't relevant, contributing to "the computer is slow". (I think the sizes were 10MB and 1GB.)