DEC Alpha

[Gary E. Miller]

Yo Achim!

On Tue, 05 Feb 2019 19:56:07 +0100
Achim Gratz via devel <devel at ntpsec.org> wrote:

> Eric S. Raymond via devel writes:
> > Achim Gratz via devel <devel at ntpsec.org>:  
> >> I visited DEC in Palo Alto one time and got to see the very first
> >> Alpha mainboard (with an alcohol heatpipe made from a glass tube
> >> atop the CPU).  
> >
> > Damn shame about the Alpha. That was a good design that DEC utterly
> > botched the positioning and marketing of.  
> 
> Actually, as originally defined it had more problems than it solved.
> That was taken care of in later iterations for the most part, but by
> then it was already on the downhill slope.

Agree.  I worked for The Panda Project on a Dec Alpha workstaion product
that we sold under the Panda Project name.  Nice machine for its day.
Ran windows well.

Our problem was that DEC had only made parts for internal use.  They
had no idea how to actually document how a CPU should work, or how to
test for compliance.

Unlike a competing part, where you could just read the data sheet for
the timing parameters, with the Alpha we had to figure it out for
ourselves the hard way.  We were doing DEC's engineering for us.

Since the setup and hold times were not specified, the parts were
not tested for compliance.  Pretty much every CPU board had to be
hand tweaked to work.

But the final killer was that they could just not ship parts to us.

> > But a few years later some of the Alpha designers took their
> > lessons to another company and it became ARM.  So there's that.  
> 
> ARM predates Alpha by almost a decade and its namesake development
> company (Acorn RISC Machines) was founded far away from any DEC
> operation.

Yeah, ARM was British.

RGDS
GARY
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gary E. Miller Rellim 109 NW Wilmington Ave., Suite E, Bend, OR 97703
	gem at rellim.com  Tel:+1 541 382 8588

	    Veritas liberabit vos. -- Quid est veritas?
    "If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it." - Lord Kelvin
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