This article brings back so many memories. My first job was as a sysadmin for a highly computational statistics department in 1993. The first alpha we had was

This article brings back so many memories. My first job was as a sysadmin for a highly computational statistics department in 1993. The first alpha we had was a DEC 300/500X ("hot pink flamingo"). I remember adding 256MB of RAM to the box on one one of my very first days on the job. At the time, the price for the memory was well into the 5 figures, and I was thinking that I'd better be careful, because the memory was worth more than I was. In a later job, I was one of 2 people to port FreeBSD to the DEC Alpha. We never supported the older turbochannel boxes, but I did a lot of the chipset support for most of the PCI alphas. Seeing the APECs diagram brought back memories of implementing the board support for them (and most of the PCI based alphas). I had an API UP1000 running FreeBSD as my desktop up until 2003 or so. That box was given to me to do the FreeBSD platform support. Much later I was lucky enough to work with Dick Sites at Google. When I realized I was going to be in a meeting with him, I brought him my copy of the alpha architecture reference manual to autograph. I can't say enough good things about him. In addition to being a luminary in the field, he's a truly wonderful human being.