[SunRescue] Nice little rescue at the swap today (alphastation -- OS suggestions?)

[Björn Ramqvist]

Robert Novak wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I rescued a "mystery" machine at a swap meet Sunday morning. THe guy
> selling it wasn't sure what it was or if it worked, but I recognized and
> understood the "Alphastation 250 4/266" on the front panel and the four
> big simms inside.

Nice. That's a low-end 266MHz EV4 Alpha machine, with usual Fast-SCSI2
and PCI-slots. It's definitly alot nicer that the TurboChannel equipped
DEC-series (DEC 3000, 4000 and so on) and is pretty fast even for modern
use.
I know I would get my hands on the latest firmware for it and switch to
SRM Console (the ARC BIOS is for Windows NT) and load it up with either
Tru64 UNIX or OpenVMS. These machines loves a fast low-latency disk, so
I plugged a 7200 rpm (2nd generation) 'Cuda in mine. I had a 4/200 here
at work as my main workstation until I switched to a P-III 550 w/
UW-SCSI disk and Linux. (It wasn't really justified to trade-in for a
higher-end Compaq workstation for my kind of use)

You probably have the standard ZLXp-E1 graphics on that beast, since you
have 8-bit graphics. Definitly nice piece of hardware that do good
2D-job and can run a fixed-frequency monitor. (= big cheap monitor)
If you want 24-bit you have to go for the ZLXp-E2 or something bigger,
although they can be rare to find. Beware though, in the 5.1 release of
Tru64 all ZLXp-graphics are unsupported, but you can use a Elsa Gloria
graphics card and still get graphics. (I'd definitly recommend Tru64 5.x
even though it has some major server oriented features)
I know some Alphas here at work which are equipped with Compaq Qvision
(EISA) and both ATI and S3-based (PCI) chipsets. You probably need to do
some trial-and-error on this if you want serious graphics. But, you can
probably find some higher-end PowerStorm graphics for Digital
workstations on eBay, like this one:
http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1225226151

I don't know about memory on these machines, but I *think* it's ECC. It
looks like standard 72-pin Parity SIMMs to me, but for some reason I
couldn't get these to work in other machines. Probably strict timing
issues, I don't know.

Only downside with these is the fact that it has just two PCI-slots,
while the Alphastation 255 and 500 has three. (And better looks)

/Regards, Bjorn