7 ms·

+1 to that. I feel his pain, having been there myself. Back when DEC Alpha CPUs were still a going concern, I was one of the maintainers of the FreeBSD/alpha

+1 to that. I feel his pain, having been there myself. Back when DEC Alpha CPUs were still a going concern, I was one of the maintainers of the FreeBSD/alpha port. While DEC shipped their workstations, they were beyond the reach of OSS developers. The first "normal" Alpha board was the API UP1000. It was basically an Alpha 21264 on an AMD motherboard & it was totally awesome. API shipped me one before they were generally available so I could get FreeBSD working on it. I used it as my desktop (running FreeBSD/alpha) for years. Sadly all things Alpha were killed off in favor of Itanium. Here is the best description I can find of it in ~30 seconds of googling: http://www.thefreelibrary.com/API+Announces+Program+to+Encourage+ISVs+And+IHVs+To+Develop+Alpha...-a059124753 http://www.thefreelibrary.com/API+Announces+Program+to+Encou...

danieldk 10y ago
I fondly remember getting an AXP-PCI 33 board as a teenager, which were (at some point) really affordable [1]. It was my first non-x86 machine. [1] http://manx.classiccmp.org/collections/mds-199909/cd1/alpha/axpcidgc.pdf http://manx.classiccmp.org/collections/mds-199909/cd1/alpha/...
salem 10y ago
There were loads of DEC multia workstations selling cheap at some point. But even those where a pain to get booting into linux of FreeBSD.
nickpsecurity 10y ago
"API shipped me one before they were generally available so I could get FreeBSD working on it. " I didn't know about that. That's pretty neat. One of Alpha's main advantages was PALcode. It was close to microcode's advantages but with only assembly knowledge required. Did you or other FreeBSD developers ever do anything cool with it? And what? Typing in the domain of that company today shows how sad the IT market works when incredible products are involved that aren't market leaders: http://www.alpha-processor.com/ http://www.alpha-processor.com/
kjs3 10y ago
I'm not sure what you mean by "normal", but DEC and a bunch of OEMs were shipping Baby-AT AlphaPC64 and ATX AlphaPC164 boards long before the 21264 shipped. The even used commodity memory and had ISA/PCI slots. I had both, and they were relatively affordable.

danieldk 10y ago

I fondly remember getting an AXP-PCI 33 board as a teenager, which were (at some point) really affordable [1]. It was my first non-x86 machine. [1] http://manx.classiccmp.org/collections/mds-199909/cd1/alpha/axpcidgc.pdf http://manx.classiccmp.org/collections/mds-199909/cd1/alpha/...

salem 10y ago

There were loads of DEC multia workstations selling cheap at some point. But even those where a pain to get booting into linux of FreeBSD.

nickpsecurity 10y ago

"API shipped me one before they were generally available so I could get FreeBSD working on it. " I didn't know about that. That's pretty neat. One of Alpha's main advantages was PALcode. It was close to microcode's advantages but with only assembly knowledge required. Did you or other FreeBSD developers ever do anything cool with it? And what? Typing in the domain of that company today shows how sad the IT market works when incredible products are involved that aren't market leaders: http://www.alpha-processor.com/ http://www.alpha-processor.com/

kjs3 10y ago

I'm not sure what you mean by "normal", but DEC and a bunch of OEMs were shipping Baby-AT AlphaPC64 and ATX AlphaPC164 boards long before the 21264 shipped. The even used commodity memory and had ISA/PCI slots. I had both, and they were relatively affordable.