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.
I hope you don’t miss it too much, and take comfort that it has moved on to a new place where it has a renewed productivity!
It’s the end of an era! I remember that thing sitting on your desk in M203. Judging from the above narrative, you’ve had the AlphaStation for just about as long as you’ve known me: since 1999.
Goodbye, my-computer. I wonder if anyone even gets that joke anymore.
Wow, I hadn’t thought of it that way.
I’ll have to ask my intern if he remembers the Network Neighborhood.
I certainly remember my-computer and network-neighborhood back in M203. And, at the time I left MIT IST (sometime in 2006), I’m pretty sure an Alphastation 200 was still being used as the student.mit.edu web server. Yes, a 10 year-old desktop-class computer was the web server where everyone went to get their grades, transcripts, and check out the course catalog.
Everything old is new again! I purchased two DEC Multia (UDB) machines and finally have one up and running. Alpha powered indeed!