I spent almost 20 years at Dec I started there in 1974 what an awesome experience it was. I worked on The PDP 8, 10 and 11, but spent most my career in the networks division. Ken Olson was a great guy it’s really to bad he got booted for Palmer who chopped the company up and sold it off piecemeal. Any way the Alpha chip was a phenomenal design out of the Hudson site. The graphics for the movie Titanic were generated using Alpha workstations. This video really warmed my heart being a DEC engineer. Many great memories and friends.

I loved working with Alpha hardware. Fast, dependable as a rock and extremely flexible.

Now that's a proper workstation. Alpha was cool, I miss these sorts of interesting workstation computers. Things are a lot more boring these days.

I think I still have a faded "The Last Alpha" tee shirt from when our plant was bought by intel.

Little bit of trivia that I remember being talked about back in the day: The original AMD K7 Athlon borrowed its EV6 bus from DEC/Alpha

I worked briefly for DEC back in the time this Workstation came out. My tech center at DEC Augusta,Maine received a number of these to test out and use. I found them quite a step up from the mainframe servers we were using at the time. Brings back fond memories. Unfortunately, shortly afterwards, the factory was sold to SCI,Inc along with the people ;/

This brings backs memories, as I managed a number of those many years ago back when Compaq had purchased the brand (Tru64 based instead of NT, though). The Alpha platform was really ahead of its time. It eventually died, like all the other propietary server/workstation architectures, unable to compete against dirt cheap and ubiquituous Linux boxes.

I might be wrong, but those long PCI slots look like 64-bit PCI slots to me. I think I saw them on older HP Proliant servers.

Just realized I saw an "X86 BIOS Emulation Copyright DEC & Microsoft" in the about section of the AlphaBIOS. That's incredible and amazingly powerful. I had no idea this thing looked like a regular IBM compatible to expansion cards. That's really really cool.

I loved Dec Alpha systems back in the day, especially running Linux on them. Wonderful machines.

Neat system! They definitely were serious about EMI compliance, with gaskets on almost every edge... Wouldn't expect any less from DEC Ferrites on a bunch of cables too, even the bundle from the front panel switches lol

The slots that "look like a mix of PCI and ISA" are PCI-X slots, and depending by version work with standard PCI cards too. Also these workstations can run Tru64 UNIX or OpenVMS (except DEC Multia, if we don't count the workaround), but you need another firmware in place of the AlphaBIOS

Nice. These things smoked all the machines of its day. I worked for an ISP in the late 90s and we used all AlphaServers 533's for our various server daemons. There was really only two options. NT 4 or Linux. There was hardly *any* 64 bit support back then. Even Windows was limited to only the binaries it came with unless you were lucky and found 64 bit Windows software back then. Fortunately the portability of Linux at the time was what made running Redhat 4 on that sucker my only real option for what we needed. But man I loved working on them. Especially since the rest of the office workers were using meager AMD K6-2's hehehe.

P.S. The i386 emulation is actually stored in the PALcode which is part of the AlphaBIOS. So the macro-code representing the i386 emulation to RISC translation is located there.

17:13 m68k CPU spotted on that optical network card :)

I've got one of these up in the loft somewhere. I didn't have NT so I put SUSE Linux on it. These workstations were the business back in the day. I still have some of the sales doc showing how much faster they were than the competition (mainly Sun & HP) at some of the major CAD apps. Fond memories of my days in DEC!

I want to see DOOM running!

I find it really fascinating how the engineers had the foresight to design an I/O daughterboard that apparently was platform-agnostic, could be mated to either an Alpha or Pentium mainboard. The power supply appears to be a mostly standard ATX unit, everything else is standard.

Nice addition to your collection! That CPU alone goes for around 100 U.S Dollars on Ebay, cant imagine how valuable the other parts are. I thought that the SCSI cable was going to be like that magic trick with the scarfs...it just kept coming out, how long was that thing? Some viewers like to see the case being cleaned and refurbished, its like ASMR....LOL. Terrific Video, thank you!

Hi. Still run some of these, ES40 and TS10 at home. If you're considering benchmarking, careful. A lot of the WinNT installation is actually i386 running under emulation. If I may make a suggestion, try a common operating system that runs natively on both systems you want to compare (eg the PPro you mentioned), NetBSD which will run natively on both. There's also a lot of benchmarks in the NetBSD pkgsrc collection. Then you're comparing apple with apples. Also the "combo" slots you mentioned are 33mhz 64bit PCI slots. So you've a few 32bit PCI, some 16bit ISA and some 64bit PCI. Quite common even in x86 servers of the age and apple smurf-towers such as the B&W G3 through to the digital audio...etc. Additionally, there is multiple operating systems supported by DEC which were NT4 and 2000 RC2? RC3? .. OSF/1 UNIX and older Digital UNIX, Tru64, and of course the most interesting is OpenVMS. Apart from WintendoNT .. nothing else uses the "AlphaBIOS" which is ARCS compatible losely as used on SGI's and other systems. The other side of the BIOS world is "SRM" which is where the fun starts and is required for OpenVMS and Tru64. :) Nice video.

Ha! Haven't seen anyone install the Gopher service in a while. Loved the Alphas, but they never caught on and I was left with the old boring Intel servers for decades. :)

Delightful! Thank you for making and sharing this video.

I recall being mightily impressed by the Alpha's architecture.. in comparison with the Motorola 680x0 I was used to, the Alpha looked like a Rolls Royce.

Thank you so much for such interest and detailed video.

The other slots are probably PCI 64 bits or PCI-X which are backwards compatible with PCI 32 bit (you can place a 64-bit PCI-X cad on a typical PCI slot). These were very popular on servers back in the time.

My best friend had one of those, might be the same model. He couldn't remember but watching the video, he confirmed it was same model. I was totally jealous as it blew away my Pentium Pro.

We had a room full of SparcStations and a room full of DEC Alpha systems at uni ... everyone usually went for the Sparc machines but I adored the Alpha's, so much faster and more responsive.

This brings back some memories, in college I bought a bare bones 21164a 533mhz system to use as a Quake multiplayer server. Wish I still had that box, had a lot of fun with it. Part of my adventures with it resulted in me getting a Windows 2000 Workstation Beta 2 disc. It includes an x86 emulation layer, so I was able to do dumb things like run Starcraft on my workstation. If you want to give it a try on your machine let me know. I *think* Alpha support was kept up to Release Candidate 1 of Win 2k so there might be later versions that could be tracked down? Also, my machine was a decent overclocker, 666mhz stable all day long, might be worth seeing if you can push yours a bit?

Great piece of kit! Cost a fortune in their day. Nice trip down memory lane with the NT server 4.0 installation :)

Really glad I found you're channel, great content.

Thanks for the video! It could be better if you will show it again with DEC Unix with CDE. Looking forward!

Thank you sir for another excellent in depth video! keep them longer videos comin'!!!

Nice video ..A room tour video wood be intressting love to see all those old pc's

I wanted an Alpha so bad in high school. Not sure what I thought I could do with it then, but boy did I salivate looking at pictures of them in magazines. Same with the NeXT workstations.

Nice video of an Alpha DEC workstation revived! Since I was a Teen, always was curious to see one in action. Would love to see benchmarks of it vs what intel and AMD had at the time. Even perhaps some gaming as well. :)

Wow, thanks for the trip back in time - I felt like I was right there in it again- Good times.

I ran one of those for a few years. Had the developers version of win2000. Used to have to run x86 software a few times before the code was "optimized" for Alpha. Worked wonderfully. My machine also had a double slot video card. They were great machines.

I Used that type of machine. We had VMS running on them. Was a very different operating enviroment to learn and get your head around its uniqueness..... Great Machine that just ran.

I would want to see a bit of typical work that should have been done on a machine like this. Something like 5 minutes of Digital Alpha user's life.

I had one of these, running openvms and nt, hitting the memories here

I had one of these, although mine was the model that couldn't boot Windows NT. It had Tru-64, Digital's proprietary Unix, installed on it when I acquired it. I later installed Debian Linux and used it as my main machine for several years until I got quad G5 Apple Mac (another decommissioned machine from my job). The Mac also ran Linux, until I finally switched to an Intel based laptop a couple of years ago.

Shares a lot of components (both case and electronics) with the PWS200i (Intel) systems which you can still find parts for on eBay. There is a missing captive popscrew on your case cover, along with a security eyelet on the back plate. The hinged front door is the same on the 200i as well. The motherboards for both processor types shared the small expansion boards (the NIC, for example). The split-board design allowed them to just build a box with a standard set of interface and peripheral devices, then simply slot in the customer's choice of processor board (Intel or DEC). The common support logic such as the bridge chips, sound, and ethernet PHY, and all the expansion slots (ISA-16, PCI, PCI-X) was all on the support board, making the physical configuration easy at the factory, and making it a lot easier to port Windows NT (an OS designed by former DEC staffers) to the Alpha. All the modules were meant to be FRUs (a commonn DEC engineering practice, Field Replaceable Units). There are still cache boards and some faster Alpha CPUs available as NOS if you look carefully. Nice to see the Alpha series version in action - I have a PWS200i (dual Pentium Pro) and PWS 266i (single), both in regular use. Beautiful, solid machines that were meant to last a long time :)

The longer PCI slots are not a combination of ISA and PCI, they are PCI-X slots that offer increased bandwidth, typically only found on servers and high end workstations of the period. If memory serves they were typically used for things like advanced SCSI controllers, high speed network adapters and advanced workstation graphics cards.

Recall one of these being in the server room when I first started work all those years ago. It was a 'halo' computer at the time. Great to see this video. Such interesting content on this channel!!!!

Thank you for the look back. 👍👍

You were special if you had access to a 433Mhz Alpha in 1996. Today, we're all equal.

Awesome vid! You should try running some Quake on it, I think there was a port of Quake for DEC Alpha!

Man, I would've lusted for this machine back in the day. ^.^

DEC: "Let's abandon Alpha and jump on the Itanium bandwagon!" Also DEC: (gets sold for scrap)

God, this was very fast to install... very powerfull machine. I used to remember that installing Windows back in those days could take up to 1 hour on a traditionnal pentium.

Lived this video! Great channel.

What a fascinating, strange machine. - Always wondered what those CPU screw threads connected to. - I like how they reused PCI slots to bridge the two sections of the mainboard together. I wonder if there are any electrical/signal compatibilities or if it's just physically the same. - Interesting that they used Intel chips while directly competing against them. I wonder if that was as a result of (or despite) their lawsuit. - Bizarre that they only semi-integrated the sound and networking. I cant imagine why they did that instead of just using off the shelf add in cards. - The BIOS displaying using VGA fonts more common to DOS is just weird. Love the features including self update, partitioner, and NT install, - Nice 68k on the FDDI card.

Another very cool machine! As would Joker say: Where does he get those wonderful toys? :D

The "combined slots" are PCI-X (PCI-eXtended) slots, supporting up to 64-bit and running at 133MHz respectively up to 533MHz as of V2 (no smartypants.. I looked it up on Wiki) How time goes by... 8- and 16-bit ISA, 32-bit EISA, Microchannel, PCI, PCI-X, Vesa, AGP, PCI-e x4/8/16... did I forget anything?

oh man I always wanted one of these as a kid

NetBEUI. Gopher. Now that really is some retro stuff!

@5:50, that DIN connector is for olde-schoole LCD shutter glasses. You are correct in that they are for 3D.

My buddy used to have one like this to run Lightwave, used to work fora record company. I remember installing a scsi card for him back in the mid 90s.

I'd love to see some games of the time. I wonder how fast was x86 emulation build into Windows NT on non-x86 platforms. And maybe see how well does it perform with native ports of Doom or Quake.

I love this video! I just traded some parts for an Alphastation 500 333 and an ATX alpha board :)

This great piece of hardware run Debian Linux pretty well, I guess.

The long white slots are PCI-X.

It's always fun to see Windows running on a non-x86 device. I'd be interested to see what software you could actually run on NT4 Alpha.

What a nice looking BIOS style!

nice video... appreciate the nostalgia

It's a great pc but even back on time it was expensive and still there is. It had a good amount of good devices.

You never stated how you actually got this DEC Alpha Personal Workstation 433a to power-up. You went from disassembly to running. What fixed the power-up problem?

PCI based Alphas had an x86 emulation mode that kicked in first that initialized the cards, so you could use a video card with an x86 bios chip, and I assume for the SCSI as well. That would explain why it did 2 separate bios routines.

I remember the Alpha on NT was one of the first systems that would remap X86 binaries to alpha binaries. I think the first x86 program I ran on Alpha was Microsoft Office

Back in 1995 there was Adaptec, Qlogic, Buslogic and NCR/Symbios as most implemented SCSI adapter chips.

14:20 The board has 16 bits ISA slots, PCI and PCI-X which is like a 64bits PCI slot for cards that required higher bandwidth like SCSI and high speed network cards

i used to have a PWS500au. It was a great machine! I used to run fbsd on it.

I would really like to get myself a Dec Alpha but they have silly prices on Fleabay

Its a MX5 (the first Miata without USB and with SCSI DMA Bug). The MiataGL was the second version without DMA SCSI Bug. It had two USB 1 ports on the back and it also runs with a 667 Mhz AXP.

Welcome to workstation-land!

IBM Pallete DAC on the video card. Great for reducing the amount of Video RAM. I remember that they had some models that had the CPU and a couple extra sockets for CISC chips.

Nice DEC PowerStorm 3D card. Would be need to see it run GL Quake.

I bid on one of these on ebay many years back. I love old systems (I have a Sun SS20 dual 85MHz machine, for example) and I was going to be able to get it for around $270 (back in '99 or '00, not sure), but I got sniped by 25 cents right at the last second.. I was the only bidder. :( Never had a chance to get one I could afford again. I heard that these workstations could compile the linux kernel much faster than intel or amd pc's at the time, but I never got a chance to find out. (fun(?) fact: it took just over 24 hours for my dual 85MHz machine to compile world on a netbsd install, I think I have a screenshot somewhere).

You can switch to the SRM firmware (used for linux, bsd, tru64 and vms) just by changing a setting in alphabios (and you can switch back with the "arc" command at the srm prompt)... the actual flash chip contains both. NT4/alpha had very little software, but linux is quite usable as a majority of things have been compiled for it. You can put 1.5gb of ram in this, although it's quite picky about what ram it will work with... There's a beta version of win2k for alpha that runs on this too, it doesn't need the HAL floppy as it has it built in. The 64bit pci slots were buggy on the earlier version of the personal workstations, there was a later revision which had a different ide controller with usb support that fixed the pci bug too. The paired pentium/alpha power connectors were because they made (or planned to?) an x86 version where the top board was different but everything else remained unchanged. There were a and au versions, the a shipped with nt while the au shipped with unix or vms, the au always came with a scsi controller whereas it was optional on the a.

Very cool! I have a similar workstation in storage, a 500au if I remember the name correctly. Not sure if it was able to run Windows NT, but I’ve used it for some dual boot experiments with OpenVMS and Tru64 Unix...and it ran FreeBSD pretty well. Gotta say, I miss those days of various different flavors of Operating systems and architectures, IT equipment has gotten pretty boring unfortunately 😢

I had a similar issue with the power button on a Vectra Lately.

Thank you for an interesting video that brought back old memories! I am curious about the end of the story with the stuck push-button, which started at 8:05 minutes. How did you get it un-stuck, and did that solve the problem of the computer not booting? If not, what did?

thanks for works. i want see This machine on the gaming and app working on winnt.

Those are 64bit PCI slots.

Hello Sir! Great video, I never had the chance to see an Alpha WS, today I learned something new from you. Thank you for presenting those exotic machines. WTB How you fixed the power button?

NT setup takes me back ... :)

about oses i hope you get a copy of open step 4.2 for pc, it's really interesting to check out as an os, but some knowladge and some advise is definelly needed to get it to work properly and in the beast way

DEC had some really nice hardware...

This would be an awesome Linux retro rig.

Ive always dreamed of having my own DEC Alpha, IBM RS6000, and an IBM AS/400... oh the memories...

Ah, Alpha. We purchased around hundred of those in 1997(I think it was '97). By 1999 the remaining ones were reallocated as secondary machines to our animation and compositing departments, and by 2000 or 2001 all were decommissioned and scrapped. 😐

This is the first time that I saw a microprocessor with 2 bolts built into it. This is also the first time that I saw a DEC Alpha processor. It's a WTF moment for me indeed.

Fantastic!

You reckon they had a separable mainboard to make servicing easier?

What an epic workstation for it's day! So glad you've given her a little love!

I just got a hold of an Intergraph TDZ 310 workstation. I've yet to dig in to it, but as I understand it, it has a Pentium pro 200 mhz, scsi, and a stupidly high end for the time video card. Like I said, I've not had the time to dig in to her yet, but I am sure by the time I am done she'll be running NT 4.0 Terminal server.

17:30 low power version of the Motorola 68000 CPU driving that optical network card!

Interesting motherboard(s).

Those were the days when 150MHz seemed huge! I remember visiting DEC park in Reading back in 1992 with all those massive VAXes in it. American Alpha computer was so secret that it stood behind bars inside the already restricted computer room. IMO the processor was a cheat: too expensive and not scalable. It had to to fail and it did.

The connector on the FDDI card is an SC fiber connector.