Alpha confusion

[altivo]

Well, I've pretty much gained control of the two pieces of old Alpha equipment that I brought home. The drives are reformatted, Linux is installed on one of them, and it's all working.

The newer system at work that we are tentatively planning to use as a webserver has been a bit more intractable, mostly due to a hardware RAID tower that it uses for disk storage. The control client software for the tower (RA3000) is not currently available.

We passed a request through to the library software vendor for information and passwords to let us unlock the existing system and reinstall it. That triggered a flurry of confusion. Although the sales people who wrote our current contract repeatedly told us that the equipment associated with the old contract was long ago paid for and they didn't want it back and couldn't use it anyway, now the technical support manager for our new contract is insisting that we are required to return ALL old equipment to them. Some of this stuff is nearly ten years old.

The pricing in both old and new contracts makes it clear that the consortium has purchased the hardware, not leased it. I don't really think they can demand it back, and I suspect the demands are related to a concern for preventing unlicensed use of software installed on the disk drives. In any case, we now have to wait for marketing and support to duke it out over this issue. Hopefully I won't have to give them back this machine, I rather like it. The DS10 looks very promising for our intended purpose too.

As for their software, it's already gone. I found a way around the RAID situation yesterday, and though I can't change the RAID setup of the tower, I was able to format and repartition the disks and install Debian on them. The Tru64 UNIX and Innovative application software that were on there have already been erased.

Comments

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

If you like the particular hardware it must be good :) I'll go that way because I don't understand enough *chuckles*

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Ho ho ho. No, don't try to simplify it that much. I have a great fondness for doing things the "old-fashioned" way. You already know that.

I like buggies and Model T Fords. The Alpha processor was a trend-setting innovation in its day, but there's a reason that they have finally stopped being produced this year. The technology has moved on to newer and higher levels. That doesn't mean an Alpha is useless, far from it. But it's about to become a cherished antique rather than a shiny new racing car.

It's a 64 bit processor, designed to operate in multiple clusters, with a 128-bit bus width and a symmetrical, reduced instruction set. The pinnacle of DEC's engineering history, the Alpha represents the kind of design brilliance that earmarked that company's history. However, DEC was killed by the steam roller marketing success of Microsoft and Intel...

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

128 Bit bandwidth and a core chip design? That doesn't sound very old at all O.O

[altivo.livejournal.com]

As computers go, it's old. The Alpha processor was first introduced in 1992, and was going strong when Compaq bought up DEC eight years later. Compaq sold the design, patents, and trademarks to Intel in 2001, which is really what killed it. The "end of product life" was announced in 2004, the last computer model to use it was released in 2006, and the last units were manufactured in April of this year. It's now officially dead. ;p

You're right, though. It was a trendsetter in many respects, and still remains very practical. Even Microsoft supported it with versions of Windows NT and Windows 2000 (but not XP.) Of course, I think you'd be crazy to waste all this computing power on Windows. The chip grew up with OpenVMS and was intended by DEC to run OpenVMS or UNIX. That's where it shines.