DEC made excellent hardware. I'm still using a dual processor AlphaServer DS25 full time, in colo, for production hosting and building NetBSD pkgsrc packages:
You and me both. Work got one as a POC and they kinda forgot about it and it landed under my desk...I was then able to wrangle a Pentium upgrade kit for it. It was a beast and incredibly well built.
They also had an excellent field technical staff. After Compaq purchased them it was always a roll of the dice as to whether you were going to get an excellent former DEC technician or an awful Compaq technician. Unfortunately the former DEC technicians quickly disappeared.
I saw a customer recently that's still running informix, I couldn't believe it but they're still writing new application code that depends on it too. It's holding their software development back and costing them a fortune by its "too hard to replace"... sigh.
Oh, man. Informix. Can't believe that thing is still around! I wrote a customer and subscription tracking system for a flower appreciation society in the 1980's using Informix and Altos Xenix. Honestly the part that surprised me about all that was they could actually afford the system and my time to write the software. Surely they fixed it later, but at the time Informix could not join between two tables and allow updates to the second table. I could never convince the customer to go to a maintenance screen and update customer records because they wanted everything updateable on one page.
So I was forced to change the table layout and main screen to hold three rows of history for each customer, and the flower society ladies would laboriously retype the information as needed to add a new row. As in manually copy row two to row three, copy row one to row two, replace information in row one. Whatever was previously in row three was just lost. But they were happy because customers only got updated once a year or so and printing newsletter labels every month was so much faster than using a Selectric.
I guess I learned early on giving the customer what they want is defined by them, not by you.
It also underlies Cisco’s Unified Communications line of VoIP products, so many organizations are depending on it without realizing. Have about 10 instances of it running at my workplace alone.
Fuck yes. TurboLaser. It sounds like what a teenager would name the "ultimate game console" he is going to create and has colored-pencil sketches of in a notebook. I wish more production hardware had awesome names like this.
NT didn't really; if anything it was designed to compromise the robust server and technical desktop market that unix providers like DEC, Sun, and SGI had.
The constant drumbeat of 'is Unix dead ?' and similar FUD hurt their image and elevated Microsoft's.
Yet over 25 years later, Windows Server is only marginally better than NT 3.51 and Linux/Unix philosophy is still dominant on internet facing servers.
Not sure how many actual customers ran NT on these things. (big mssql shops?) But DEC had also successfully mode-switched into x86 servers and services. At one point, the commodity server sales leaders were Compaq, HP, DEC -- who all merged together.
We ran NT on something quite similar to the article, hosting a large Lotus Notes(!) database which ran a Hotmail-like public email service. Unfortunately the system was rented. So when we rewrote the service and moved it off to Linux machines costing a tiny fraction of the price, the beefy 3 core Alpha was returned, rather than letting me install Linux on it to see how it could really perform :-/
DEC didn't have it in their DNA to compete on price and deliver 'good enough' solutions. We praise them today for these fantastically robust boards and very clean power delivery, but in the end it destroyed the company. Ken Olsen was wilfully blind to the PC revolution, mainly because he knew he couldn't get the margins needed from home users for his over-engineered designs and expensive sales teams.
Not sure on this particular board, but Alpha machines of the era were using standard aluminum heatsinks. Lots of individual aluminum slabs with chunky fins. If you image search for "alphaserver cpu board" or similar you'll see some. The 4-bolt versions are newer.
These should be able to; iirc, there was special PALcode (like firmware) for the ones that ran DEC Unix/Tru64/VMS vs. the ones that were setup for NT. The NT Alphas used ARC firmware, a Turbolaser like this one would use DEC SRM.
Also, if the machine is a "full flash" not "half flash", then it can have ARC and SRM installed at the same time and SRM can use that to boot ARC-based systems as well, iirc.
https://twitter.com/AnachronistJohn/status/13559959903988817...
It has the updated 21264C-6 (EV68CB) processors, which are still very speedy, all things considered.