From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: stewart@serissa.com (Lawrence Stewart) Date: Thu, 5 Jan 2017 18:40:21 -0500 Subject: [TUHS] lost ports In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <026BD615-AC89-4407-9CB7-5819DCAA972E@serissa.com> I left Digital in 1994, so I don’t know much about the later evolution of the Alphaservers, but 1998 would have been about right for en EV-56 (EV-5 shrink) or EV-6. There’s a Wikipedia article about all the different systems but most of the dates are missing. The white label parts are all PAL22V10-15s. The 8 square chips are cache SRAMS, and most the the SOIC jellybeans are bus transceivers to connect the CPU to RAM and I/O. The PC derived stuff is in the back corner. There are 16 DIMM slots to make two ranks of 54 bit RAM out of 8-bit DIMMs. We usually ran with a SCSI card, an ethernet, and an 8514 graphics card plugged into the riser. -L > On 2017, Jan 5, at 5:55 PM, ron minnich wrote: > > What version of this would I have bought ca. 1998? I had 16 of some kind of Alpha nodes in AMD sockets, interconnected with SCI for encoding videos. I ended up writing and releasing what I think were the first open source drivers for SCI -- it took a long time to get Dolphin to let me release them. > > The DIPs with white labels -- are those PALs or somethin? Or are the labels just to cover up part names :-) > > On Thu, Jan 5, 2017 at 2:39 PM Lawrence Stewart > wrote: > Alphas in PC boxes! I dug around in the basement and found my Beta (photo attached). > > This was from 1992 or 1993 I think. This is an EV-3 or EV-4 in a low profile PC box using pc peripherals. Dave Conroy designed the hardware, I did the console ROMS (BIOS equivalent) and X server, and Tom Levergood ported OSF-1. A joint project of DEC Semiconductor Engineering and the DEC Cambridge Research Lab. I think about 20 were built, and the idea kickstarted a line of low end Alphaservers. > > This was a typical Conroy minimalist design, crunching the off-chip caches, PC junk I/O, ISA bus, and 64 MBytes of RAM into this little space. I think one gate array would replace about half of the chips. > > -L > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: