[HN Gopher] AXPbox Alpha Emulator ___________________________________________________________________ AXPbox Alpha Emulator Author : zdw Score : 41 points Date : 2021-01-23 16:36 UTC (1 days ago) (HTM) web link (github.com) (TXT) w3m dump (github.com) | jandeboevrie wrote: | Version 1.0.0 was released just yesterday: | https://github.com/lenticularis39/axpbox/releases/tag/v1.0.0 | | Code Contributions, bug reports and testing are very welcome | mrlonglong wrote: | es40 works just fine for me with OpenVMS, but I will take a look | at this one to see if I can add it to my library of emulators. | Kudos. | jandeboevrie wrote: | It's a fork of es40. New build system, more stable networking, | bug fixes, but don't expect miracles just yet. 10 year old c++ | codebase is not something you magically speed up overnight | tyingq wrote: | I remember thinking that Alpha might eventually topple x86. At | the time, there was no x86-64, and Linux was still buggy, so the | RISC platforms were thriving...and Alpha was at the top. Then | Microsoft made NT run on Alpha. All in the early to mid 90's. | Then the 1-2 combination of the Itanium distraction followed by | the Opteron + 64 bit Linux, and then Alpha died. | avhception wrote: | I got my first computer around the time that happened, a humble | Pentium 1. | | It was only much, much later that I learned about Linux, then | FreeBSD and the whole history behind UNIX, RISC machines and | all that - at a point when it was mostly history. | | I even acquired some machines out of pure fascination. I got an | IBM RS/6000, a Sun Ultra45 and a Blade 100. | | Still gotta get a MIPS and, especially, an Alpha machine. | | These machines seemed so much more serious compared to PCs, I | was blown away when I discovered there had been 64 bit | architectures in the mid-90s! To this day, PCs seem like toys | to me with their gimmick-y firmware. | | It always left me wondering about what could have been. And | Alpha may have been the most promising back in the day! | spijdar wrote: | What's more, there were 64 bit _laptops_ in the mid 90s. Not | particularly mobile ones, but if you could tolerate a 7 pound | behemoth, you could get a 200 MHz 64 bit SPARC processor with | 512MB of RAM in '96/97. The AlphaBook with an Alpha | processor that was announced in '95 comes even earlier. | https://www.vaxbarn.com/index.php/other-bits/555-tadpole- | alp... | | One thing that always strikes me about workstations and | (especially?) these laptops is that, while the CPUs | themselves weren't always much faster than competing Intel | ones, they always seemed to have much better I/O options. The | SCSI drives and controllers seemed to get much better | throughput with lower CPU utilization, which pays dividends | to how the overall system performs. | | A well designed workstation is more than just the sum of its | parts. While these workstations/servers were arguably | overpriced and it's not surprising they failed to the cheaper | Wintel machines, they just seemed more well rounded... | nineteen999 wrote: | > The SCSI drives and controllers seemed to get much better | throughput with lower CPU utilization, which pays dividends | to how the overall system performs. | | Indeed - my employer at the time acquired 10 AlphaPC 164SX | motherboards with 21164PC CPU's and after adding a nice | amount of RAM and a nice fast Ultra2 SCSI drive they felt | really fast. I remember running the early GNOME 1.0 desktop | on it and it was just so responsive. | retrac wrote: | There is a deep irony to it. DEC basically created the | minicomputer market by eating away at the low end of the | mainframe industry. They would later be myopic when the same | was done to them. They almost completely missed the PC | revolution. They never quite grasped that the future was in | commodity silicon and the desktop form factor. | | The VAX was a processor-on-a-chip by 1985, several months | before the Intel 386 came out. A complete 32-bit machine that | could fit in a desktop form factor. It never really happened. | In the late 80s they would weakly pursue the high-end | workstation market. But a cheap, mass-produced VAX was | anathema. | | Alpha would follow the same pattern, and by then PCs were | already the established architecture. It would have been too | late to veer into the consumer market, probably. | avhception wrote: | It's interesting to compare this to what is happening with | smartphones / ARM and Intel / x86. | tyingq wrote: | If Apple were white-labeling M1's for anyone to use, I'd | expect full-blown panic at Intel. Intel can at least breath | a little knowing that Apple and AWS are going to keep their | ARM CPUs in-house. | mech422 wrote: | Yeah - I had high hopes for the alpha as well. I think it had | more to do with Dec not getting price competitive with x86 | before x86_64 took off. I don't really think the Itanium | factored into it - it always seemed more of an 'also ran' then | a real threat. | | I think I might still have some Dec Multia's with Alpha 166MHgz | out in the garage somewher. Neat lil boxes. | bitwize wrote: | When Compaq bought out DEC they shuttered all Alpha | development in favor of Itanium. Continuing to develop a | competing ISA would put them in a bad place as an Intel | customer. | | All this happened before x86_64 was a thing. | p_l wrote: | The way it was done was so abrupt that Windows 2000 nearly | released with Alpha version on standard CD (which would be | AFAIK 64bit clean, unlike the older ones), but essentially | the whole NT/alpha team (which was part of Compaq) was told | close to RTM release "sorry, your project was closed". | | Later, Compaq had to restart production, and HP even had to | introduce updated chip, because some customers, especially | VMS, didn't want to move to _slower_ Itanium machines. | | I have even heard that part of Itanium's flop was how often | older EV6 machines were running circles around new Itanium | ones... | tyingq wrote: | _" I don't really think the Itanium factored into it"_ | | There's a sibling comment that mentions Compaq putting in the | final nail. But, my impression was that more customers might | have switched to Alpha servers (from HP-UX, Solaris, etc) if | they didn't think Itanium was going to win the market. It | also gave more credibility to x86-64 by sort of confirming | that old-school RISC was dying. Itanium did end up with a | heavy stigma, but there was a time when many thought it would | be the future. | lsllc wrote: | There's some interesting discussion of the ultimate demise | of the Alpha here: | | http://alasir.com/articles/alpha_history/compaq_epoch.html | mailslot wrote: | Intel also blatantly stole patented technology from DEC. The | Pentium onward, IIRC, ripped off entire designs. When Compaq | eventually acquired DEC, they cancelled all of the lawsuits and | gave Intel complete access to DEC's patents. They also gave | Intel DEC's raced out ARM chip that they built for Apple. | lsllc wrote: | Interesting, worth also pointing out the SIMH project which can | emulate the VAX, MicroMAX, PDPs etc and many others: | | https://github.com/simh/simh | | For the VMS-nostalgic, VSI now have OpenVMS running on x64 Intel | (and in fact apparently already released it as 9.0!): | | https://vmssoftware.com/updates/state-of-the-port/ ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-01-24 23:00 UTC)