The Scottosphere

Last week­end I retired my trusty old Dig­i­tal AlphaS­ta­tion 200 4/233. When it was intro­duced in 1994 (retail price: $15,595 with UNIX and a 1 GB hard drive), it was one of the first 64-bit com­put­ers intended for desk­top use. At that time, a 90 MHz Pen­tium was con­sid­ered top-of-the-line for desk­top com­put­ing, and this sucker was scream­ing at 233 MHz! When I bought one sec­ond­hand from a co-worker for $200 in 1999, it was still a rea­son­ably fast machine.

At some point, I out­fit­ted it with a 9 GB Ultra2 LVD SCSI drive and it became my pri­mary work­sta­tion. I briefly ran Linux on it, but soon dis­cov­ered that Tru64 UNIX not only ran more reliably—in fact, it never crashed once—but that it con­tained some inter­est­ing secu­rity, clus­ter­ing, and filesys­tem capa­bil­i­ties that were way ahead of their time.

I have always had a soft spot for the DEC Alpha archi­tec­ture. I am a big fan of ele­gance and sim­plic­ity in engi­neer­ing. Which made me a RISC per­son. Unfor­tu­nately, DEC’s engi­neer­ing didn’t really sur­vive the sequen­tial acqui­si­tions by Com­paq and then HP. And even­tu­ally the mar­ket proved two things: that ulti­mately, nobody cares how ele­gant a proces­sor design is, and that nobody can out-spend Intel on inno­va­tion. Thus the Alpha took its place on history’s long list of tech­no­log­i­cally supe­rior alter­na­tives that got left behind.

Some time around 2003 or 2004, I started using an SGI O2 for a desk­top machine (another fla­vor of retro-tech!), rel­e­gat­ing the Alphas­ta­tion to a cor­ner to live a quiet life as a Web server. There it ran for another 6 or 7 years. I moved most of my impor­tant files (includ­ing this Web site) to a more mod­ern PC sev­eral years ago, but it took me until this year to finally tran­si­tion the Alphastation’s last duties to other servers.

I sold my-computer on eBay this week for a whop­ping $382, which, even fac­tor­ing in infla­tion, rep­re­sents a solid profit. How many of your com­put­ers have appre­ci­ated in value over time?

I shipped it off to Texas this morn­ing. So long, my-computer. It’s been a good 11 years.