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That's really amazing. Rather more than 20 years ago, a DEC/COMPAQ salesperson cold-called me to see if the ISP I was working at would like to switch to Alpha
by dsr_ 6y ago
That's really amazing.
Rather more than 20 years ago, a DEC/COMPAQ salesperson cold-called me to see if the ISP I was working at would like to switch to Alpha servers. After about 20 minutes, he offered a six-month free loan of a mid-range server -- probably $10-15K, I don't recall. It arrived a week later. We determined the hardware was pretty nice but the operating system was a major PITA -- this was when you expected to compile a large fraction of your software -- so it mostly sat on someone's desk for the last four months of the loan before the salesperson came to claim it.
- jeffbee 6y agoCompaq also used to provide publicly-available "testdrive" Alpha servers that you could just shell into. This was way before the idea of cloud computing was mainstream. A lot of gnu+linux/alpha development happened thanks to testdrive.compaq.com (which is dead now, of course).
- dsr_ 6y agoThis was before the Alpha port of Linux happened; if it had been available instead of OSF/1, we would have done more with the machine. But, yes: if you want to market hardware that nobody else can supply, you need to get it into the hands of people who will use it and evangelize for it.