I have a huge soft spot in my heart for DEC. They hold the same place in my heart that Sun does for a lot of people. One of my first *nix accounts was on MIPS

I have a huge soft spot in my heart for DEC. They hold the same place in my heart that Sun does for a lot of people. One of my first *nix accounts was on MIPS DECstations running ULTRIX as an undergrad. My first job was as a *nix sysadmin for a small academic department running DECstations with ULTRIX. This was in 1993, and I helped them transition to DEC Alphas. One of the first things I did was upgrade the RAM in a 3000/500X ("hot pink flamingo". The cost of the RAM kit was more than my annual salary, so I paid extra close attention to the EST precautions. I moved on to being research staff in a department doing OS research, and was paid to help port FreeBSD to the DEC Alpha. One of my fondest memories is getting a UP1000 from API (Alpha Processor Inc, who made Alpha boards with AMD chipsets) to port FreeBSD to. (Alpha was a bit like older Arm, and each board was a bit different w/o a generic way to discover hardware). And to cap it all off, I got to work with Dick Sites (one of the Alpha architects) at Google. When I first met him, he autographed my old copy of the DEC Alpha Architecture Reference manual. He was the nicest guy ever, and even offered to give me a ride to the airport one day when I had a really early flight. I love it when my heros are amazing people.