7 ms·

Fun. I was one of the software developers on the SPARCbook series (prior to the acquisition), as well as the Alpha machine for Digital, the P1000/P1300 (Pentiu

by gonzo 8y ago

Fun. I was one of the software developers on the SPARCbook series (prior to the acquisition), as well as the Alpha machine for Digital, the P1000/P1300 (Pentium), and IBM (PowerPC). Great memories of a small team taking on huge challenges.

rhombocombus 8y ago
That's awesome! My grandpa had an alpha desktop back in the '90s and I loved that thing. It was my first non-apple or ms-dos experience so I have a soft spot, and I haven't heard anyone mention those in years.
- kwindla 8y ago
  Starting in the mid-1990s you could find amazing deals on SPARC and Alpha “desktop” motherboards. They were both great architectures in many ways, interesting platforms for hacking, and sometimes much faster than Intel boxes of the time for certain workloads. I think the brief affordability of relatively recent vintage non-Intel hardware was a combination of the sudden growth of Internet 1.0 funding fierce competition between hardware companies (Sun was taking Java to the bank) plus Microsoft and IBM trying hard to get out from under Intel’s desktop hardware monopoly. I miss those days! It felt like CPU hardware was this amazing frontier that just kept expanding every day. On the other hand, now you can buy a $10 embedded ARM board that’s faster than a high end AlphaStation from the late 1990s, so that’s definitely just 100% pure nostalgia for my misspent youth. When I got to the Media Lab as a 21 year old grad student in 1996 I had never actually physically seen a Sun or DEC box. Lots of my new colleagues had worked at tech companies between undergrad and grad school, so they sometimes had old workstations and terminals in their apartments. I remember seeing a headless SPARCStation 10 under a coffee table (presumably running running mail, DNS, and Usenet for a few folks) and being blown away. I mean, you could put 512 MB of RAM in that thing.
  - jandrese 8y ago
    I remember the Alphas in the computer lab at school. They seemed nice enough but didn't seem that much faster than the Pentium chip in my personal computer and put out a lot of heat. Given the price of them vs. a Pentium 100 with FreeBSD it really was the end of days for the Unix Workstation.
    - ido 8y ago
      The Pentium was really the Amiga of its time - it was a remarkable technological achievement & the first x86 CPU that could compete with workstation RISC CPUs, which was far from a trivial achievement. If the 486 was the final nail in the m68k's coffin the pentium's was the same for the high-end RISCs.
- nineteen999 8y ago
  It was actually reasonably easy to assemble one yourself. A company I worked for bought a bunch of motherboards with 21164 (EV56) CPU's. I took one home, and was surprised to find at the time it was reasonably easy to get it into an ATX case, install RAM, CPU and Debian on it. I have fond memories of building Gnome 1.x from sources on it. It felt really fast compared to the Pentium 2 and 3's of the day.
neonate 8y ago
Any stories come to mind to share?
- gonzo 8y ago
  Many. The initial PowerPC port was done by three people: Jes Wills, Andy Giles and Tony Sumpter. When they traveled to Austin, TX to present the work, the AIX software manager who had been in-charge of the ThinkPad Woodfield (6020) effort wanted to know where the rest of the team was. Her team was over 40 people, and they'd taken over 18 months to get to a port. The Tadpole team for the initial port was 3 people, and had taken six months. --- There was a ritual on the engineering team that you were to drink a "gallon of Abbot" on your 30th (birthday). The gallon, of course, was an Imperial gallon (8 20oz pints, or 4.54 litres. The Abbot was Greene King's Abbot Ale, which is 5% ABC. You have to start early to get it done, and it still wrecks you. --- The US Navy was very upset that the Tadpole case was made of AZ91D magnesium (alloy). Wouldn't let it on-board anything because Mg + 2H2O → Mg(OH)2 + H2. Tadpole used it because it has similar density (1.81 g/cm^3, 1.046 lb/in^3) to ABS/PC blend with 20% glass fiber (1.25 g/cm^3), and it has high heat conductivity, so we used the case as a heat sink. AZ91D has an ignition temperature of approximately 468°C (875°F), which is difficult to reach and maintain due to magnesium’s high heat conductivity. --- A magazine (I forget which one) wanted to do a story on how the laptop would stop bullets. So we took a couple dead systems to the local gun range (Red's Indoor Range in Austin, TX) and tried it out. It wouldn't stop a .22, but that didn't stop us from blowing the hell out of the rest with larger calibre firearms. (Several of us were good friends with the people at Red's back then.) Whenever the Brits came over, they wanted to go to Red's, and we were all too willing to take them. The engineering area in Cambridge (England) was decorated with the silhouette targets they took back to show their efforts. --- George Grey (CEO) and Bob Booth (CFO) went on to found and run GeoFox who had a Psion 5 work-alike. (http://www.ericlindsay.com/epoc/geofox.htm http://www.ericlindsay.com/epoc/geofox.htm). It didn't work out, so George became the President of Psion USA, and then the President and CEO of SavaJe, which became JavaFX Mobile after it was acquired by Sun. Savaje apparently inspired Android. https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/blog/mass-high-tech/2010/09/oracle-ip-suit-against-google-tied-to-boston.html https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/blog/mass-high-tech/2010/... George and Bob were most recently at Linaro, and are now at foundries.io. Both in the positions they had at Tadpole.
kev009 8y ago
Tadpole I am pretty sure did the N40, and then IBM did the 800-series themselves right?
- classichasclass 8y ago
  I think that's right.
- gonzo 8y ago
  IIRC, yes.
sodosopa 8y ago
I ran Alpha servers back then along side a bevy of DG/UX Aviion and Clariion servers. The DECs always out-performed the DG/UX boxes.
- jcims 8y ago
  I never used an Alpha, but somehow I fostered such an inflated impression of their performance that if someone told me today that their new i9 wunderbeast was almost as fast it would take a little while before I didn’t believe them.
  - cb88 8y ago
    Well a lot of the Alpha engineers ended up working on and helped design AMD's AMD64 extensions and hypertransport bus, after AMD adopted the Alpha's EV6 bus for the Athlon you could say Alpha technology and engineers had a huge effect on why AMD bested Intel for quite awhile back in the day. If it wasn't for the Digital and AMD engineers we'd all be suffering with IA-64 etc... I think it's more likely PPC would have remained a force to be reckoned with in the Desktop space.
    - jcims 8y ago
      Hey that’s some cool background info, thank you!!
- xxpor 8y ago
  The Alpha memory model has always scared the bejesus out of me. I bet it makes things fast though.
  - sodosopa 8y ago
    fast and stable. Before I left that company, one box had an uptime of over 14 months.

by gonzo 8y ago

rhombocombus 8y ago

That's awesome! My grandpa had an alpha desktop back in the '90s and I loved that thing. It was my first non-apple or ms-dos experience so I have a soft spot, and I haven't heard anyone mention those in years.

kwindla 8y ago
Starting in the mid-1990s you could find amazing deals on SPARC and Alpha “desktop” motherboards. They were both great architectures in many ways, interesting platforms for hacking, and sometimes much faster than Intel boxes of the time for certain workloads. I think the brief affordability of relatively recent vintage non-Intel hardware was a combination of the sudden growth of Internet 1.0 funding fierce competition between hardware companies (Sun was taking Java to the bank) plus Microsoft and IBM trying hard to get out from under Intel’s desktop hardware monopoly. I miss those days! It felt like CPU hardware was this amazing frontier that just kept expanding every day. On the other hand, now you can buy a $10 embedded ARM board that’s faster than a high end AlphaStation from the late 1990s, so that’s definitely just 100% pure nostalgia for my misspent youth. When I got to the Media Lab as a 21 year old grad student in 1996 I had never actually physically seen a Sun or DEC box. Lots of my new colleagues had worked at tech companies between undergrad and grad school, so they sometimes had old workstations and terminals in their apartments. I remember seeing a headless SPARCStation 10 under a coffee table (presumably running running mail, DNS, and Usenet for a few folks) and being blown away. I mean, you could put 512 MB of RAM in that thing.
- jandrese 8y ago
  I remember the Alphas in the computer lab at school. They seemed nice enough but didn't seem that much faster than the Pentium chip in my personal computer and put out a lot of heat. Given the price of them vs. a Pentium 100 with FreeBSD it really was the end of days for the Unix Workstation.
  - ido 8y ago
    The Pentium was really the Amiga of its time - it was a remarkable technological achievement & the first x86 CPU that could compete with workstation RISC CPUs, which was far from a trivial achievement. If the 486 was the final nail in the m68k's coffin the pentium's was the same for the high-end RISCs.
nineteen999 8y ago
It was actually reasonably easy to assemble one yourself. A company I worked for bought a bunch of motherboards with 21164 (EV56) CPU's. I took one home, and was surprised to find at the time it was reasonably easy to get it into an ATX case, install RAM, CPU and Debian on it. I have fond memories of building Gnome 1.x from sources on it. It felt really fast compared to the Pentium 2 and 3's of the day.

neonate 8y ago

Any stories come to mind to share?

gonzo 8y ago
Many. The initial PowerPC port was done by three people: Jes Wills, Andy Giles and Tony Sumpter. When they traveled to Austin, TX to present the work, the AIX software manager who had been in-charge of the ThinkPad Woodfield (6020) effort wanted to know where the rest of the team was. Her team was over 40 people, and they'd taken over 18 months to get to a port. The Tadpole team for the initial port was 3 people, and had taken six months. --- There was a ritual on the engineering team that you were to drink a "gallon of Abbot" on your 30th (birthday). The gallon, of course, was an Imperial gallon (8 20oz pints, or 4.54 litres. The Abbot was Greene King's Abbot Ale, which is 5% ABC. You have to start early to get it done, and it still wrecks you. --- The US Navy was very upset that the Tadpole case was made of AZ91D magnesium (alloy). Wouldn't let it on-board anything because Mg + 2H2O → Mg(OH)2 + H2. Tadpole used it because it has similar density (1.81 g/cm^3, 1.046 lb/in^3) to ABS/PC blend with 20% glass fiber (1.25 g/cm^3), and it has high heat conductivity, so we used the case as a heat sink. AZ91D has an ignition temperature of approximately 468°C (875°F), which is difficult to reach and maintain due to magnesium’s high heat conductivity. --- A magazine (I forget which one) wanted to do a story on how the laptop would stop bullets. So we took a couple dead systems to the local gun range (Red's Indoor Range in Austin, TX) and tried it out. It wouldn't stop a .22, but that didn't stop us from blowing the hell out of the rest with larger calibre firearms. (Several of us were good friends with the people at Red's back then.) Whenever the Brits came over, they wanted to go to Red's, and we were all too willing to take them. The engineering area in Cambridge (England) was decorated with the silhouette targets they took back to show their efforts. --- George Grey (CEO) and Bob Booth (CFO) went on to found and run GeoFox who had a Psion 5 work-alike. (http://www.ericlindsay.com/epoc/geofox.htm http://www.ericlindsay.com/epoc/geofox.htm). It didn't work out, so George became the President of Psion USA, and then the President and CEO of SavaJe, which became JavaFX Mobile after it was acquired by Sun. Savaje apparently inspired Android. https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/blog/mass-high-tech/2010/09/oracle-ip-suit-against-google-tied-to-boston.html https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/blog/mass-high-tech/2010/... George and Bob were most recently at Linaro, and are now at foundries.io. Both in the positions they had at Tadpole.

kev009 8y ago

Tadpole I am pretty sure did the N40, and then IBM did the 800-series themselves right?

classichasclass 8y ago
I think that's right.
gonzo 8y ago
IIRC, yes.

sodosopa 8y ago

I ran Alpha servers back then along side a bevy of DG/UX Aviion and Clariion servers. The DECs always out-performed the DG/UX boxes.

jcims 8y ago
I never used an Alpha, but somehow I fostered such an inflated impression of their performance that if someone told me today that their new i9 wunderbeast was almost as fast it would take a little while before I didn’t believe them.
- cb88 8y ago
  Well a lot of the Alpha engineers ended up working on and helped design AMD's AMD64 extensions and hypertransport bus, after AMD adopted the Alpha's EV6 bus for the Athlon you could say Alpha technology and engineers had a huge effect on why AMD bested Intel for quite awhile back in the day. If it wasn't for the Digital and AMD engineers we'd all be suffering with IA-64 etc... I think it's more likely PPC would have remained a force to be reckoned with in the Desktop space.
  - jcims 8y ago
    Hey that’s some cool background info, thank you!!
xxpor 8y ago
The Alpha memory model has always scared the bejesus out of me. I bet it makes things fast though.
- sodosopa 8y ago
  fast and stable. Before I left that company, one box had an uptime of over 14 months.