[rescue] what to do with a dec alpha 255

[Mr Ian Primus]

--- stephen price <sd_price at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Cleaning out my last (gasp) offsite locker of "junk"
> -
> ran across a dec alpha 255 desktop - was wondering
> if
> its worth keeping, if so - what o/s (have tru64
> 4.0f-5.2) but no real need.  Maybe some other o/s or
> maybe give it away.

I found the boards for a DEC AplhaStation  (255, I do
believe) a few years ago, in a bin of scrap. Just the
boards - motherboard, PCI riser, RAM, CPU. No case,
P/S or the funny Ethernet riser. Having never played
with an Alpha before, I saved it, and rebuilt it. I
hacked up a desktop PC clone case, and built an
adapter harness to run it off an ATX power supply.
Fitted some PCI cards, and got it to run. Bypassed the
password in the BIOS (or whatever the Alpha PROM
console is called), installed a hard disk and CDROM,
and got it to run Linux. I had plans to turn it into a
mail server, and never got around to it.

All in all, a really neat machine. And the only Alpha
I had for a long time. About a year ago, I found one
that was all together - I had never seen the "proper"
case before...

-Ian