I should mention Linux could also emulate x86 code on Alpha, but most code was complied for Alpha, things like Netscape and Acrobat used x86 emulation.

I worked for DEC for 34 years and saw the whole parade. I can vouch for what a great place to work it was. Here’s a story that for me symbolizes where it went: after Ken Olsen came Bob Palmer, a gunslinger hired to decommission the place. One day he came to our office in Greenbelt, MD to speak. There was a parking garage in the basement, the conference room on the first floor. They defined a walkway for him with theater ropes and a red carpet for him to walk on all the way from the garage to the conference room. Heaven knows you wouldn’t want to actually encounter some riff raff along the way. I’m sure Ken Olsen would have blown his stack at such a display of imperiousness. BTW, I heard an engineer talk at the end of Alpha who said there wasn’t much headroom for growth in the architecture. Another tidbit is that DEC’s chip manufacturing folks had feature size and clock speed that was WAY ahead of competitors at the time. The integration of those people and compiler folks also made Alpha what it was. All THAT was sold to Intel. RIP Ken and DEC. I’m forever indebted to you.

I worked for DEC between 1985 and 1995. The only company I ever worked for that DEMANDED you to go on trainings for at least 8 weeks a year, all expenses paid. The amount of groundbreaking technology that came out of this company is mind boggling, and I still have to see a modern cluster system that runs as effortlessly and scalably as VAXclusters back at the time. Also: the search engine (Altavista), the firewall (Marcus J. Ranum and the DECwrl team), etc. Compaq bought a wounded swan and butchered it.

Former DEC employee (electronics tech -> software engineer). I spent a lot of time on PDP-11s as a tech. PDP-11 was a 16-bit computer, not 8-bit. It was capable of operating on 8-bit data, however, the instructions were 16 bits as were all the registers.

I had a short stint as a VMS admin at the time of the Alpha transition. VMS is, to me, one of the, if not THE greatest operating system ever. Seeing DEC fall was gut wrenching. Watching Compaq/HP absolutely throw VMS into the garbage the way they did was also infuriating. Personally I think the world in general and computing in particular is worse off with the demise of DEC.

There was also Altavista, the go-to search engine in the early internet years. Created by DEC and running mostly on Alpha machines, as far as I know.

Alpha was the first CPU architecture that got Linux after x86. Linus Thorvalds wrote his Master's thesis about the port.

I spent several years developing on VMS and even working as a sysadmin for an 11/750and 11/780. When the OS disk suffered a head crash I simply dropped a backup copy into the removable drive, swapped the ‘disk 0’ and ‘disk 1’ plastic activity lamp covers and booted. So many aspects were so thoroughly thought through. And the quality of the documentation… second to none.

Another Alpha legacy: DEC licensed the EV6 bus architecture to AMD for their Athlon platform, which saved them from having to spend piles of cash they didn't have developing their own, or licensing the GTL+ bus from their biggest rival, Intel. The Athlon CPU was arguably the turning point for AMD and legitimized them as a competitor to Intel, and not just a knock-off company. You could easily argue that AMD wouldn't be what it is today if it weren't for DEC/Alpha. And I remember back in the late 90s I snagged a DEC AlphaStation slimline desktop from an auction site, and managed to get NT 4.0 running on it. It would probably be more interesting today since getting it connected to broadband would be trivial. As it was back then, home networking was pretty much non existent and I never got motivated to get an external modem for it. But it was a great little machine and I was thrilled to finally make use of something on the NT install disk that didn't come from the i386 folder. I never did get around to finding a similar MIPS workstation. :D

I had a 21164 at 500MHz back in 1997/1998 and I adored it (I still have it in my storage). I ran Tru64 Unix on it and it owned everything. We had two GS140s with Tru64 and TruCluster for our back end. We made the first online actual animal production and health database. Which allowed us to predict locations of food and mouth disease outbreaks. We used them for fluid Sims to simulate the spread of Corona viruses in pig stables. Because we already know for 30 years that Coronas primarily spread by air as our systems also proved. And we could fend of disease by tweaking the air intake and are expulsion speeds. All that was floating point cpu breaking stuff that the GS140s did.

Long time DEC coder. RSTS/E on the pdp-11, and VMS. A lot of assembler programming. Back in the day I could churn out macro 32 code as fast as some did basic. I really miss how phenominally good all DEC's documentation was. No one else comes close. Those machines were a joy to program.

I was working at Air Force Research Lab Ins Rome, NY as a Jr computer engineer during college in 1991-1995. Our primary machine in my group at that time was a Sun machine, which to me was pretty hot stuff! One day there was a DEC sales team that came to the lab to show off Alpha. I had heard a little about it through magazines but has never seen one until then. During the demo they ran the isohedron graphics demo (everytbing was software rendering back then) and it utterly blew away the Sun machine but like 10x. I was floored! Wanted one of those SOOOOO badly at that point. It’s really too bad compaq killed it off. It really could have been a strong contender and might still be around today…

18:21 Fun fact: the VAXstation, and DEC itself, played a key part in the development of the X11 windowing standard. The precursor X10 system was actually tied specifically to VAXstation display hardware; the X11 rework made it portable.

Another DEC legacy, is Windows-NT itself. Dave Cutler - having been a lead on VMS and previous lead on a couple of the PDP O/S's - not surprisingly was heavily influenced by his DEC background in designing Windows-NT (in fact the old joke is that WNT is VMS+1) and along with the ex-DEC team he brought to Microsoft, implemented a lot of core VMS concepts, and some code such as the task scheduler is remarkably similar - so much so that DEC took Microsoft to court over it, and MS settled at the last minute. I worked on PDP systems using multiple O/S options, and VAX systems using both VMS and Ultrix-32, and was always impressed with the quality of the equipment and attention to detail put into the designs. The other *BIG* thing about DEC was Documentation - it existed for almost everything and was extensive. These were machines and systems designed by engineers and then marketed by sales teams, rather than the other way around.

I worked at DEC from the early 80's until the mid 2000s. Our feelings about Ken getting ousted were exactly as described in the video. Things started getting really bad when Bob Palmer (AKA GQ Bob) was hired to dismantle the company and make it attractive to be acquired.

The Alpha project had an interesting and ambitious goal: 1000x performance improvement over its lifetime, broken down as 10x from process improvement (i.e. clockspeed), 10x from IPC improvements and 10x from multiprocessor environment. That doesn't sound as impossible when it's broken down like that, and it is scarily close to how the industry has moved, though perhaps not 100% as they envisaged.

Ex DEC employee and VMS system manager here. Well done. I was there when they ousted Ken. Super bummer time to work there starting at the heyday and then the downward slide. What a great company. I wish you included the part where DEC gave Intel the secret architecture Alpha design plans to create a second Alpha source where Intel declined to become an Alpha FAB source but stole the design to make their chips run faster.

Excellent video! I worked at DEC for 16 years and was one of the folks who left when Ken Olson was let go, because as you've said, it wasn't DEC anymore. I look back and miss the good times I had working with PDP11s and VAX. My last position was with the development team that ported DEC Unix to the 64 bit Alpha. I still have a VT100 and LA120 in the basement. Those were the days....

I worked for DEC from 1976 to 1993. You can put me in the same group that basically worshiped Ken Olsen. Not in a religious sense but in a human sense. I knew no one that had a bad word to say about him. He was so down to earth. Used to visit plants and just stop and ask workers what they were working on etc. He was interested in what you were doing. Wore patches over the elbows on his suits. Drove a Ford Maverick for quite some time even though he was worth well over 200 million at the time. What many do not realize is that DEC had the best field service group in the world, some 40k strong. When Compaq bought DEC, they only did so to acquire the field service unit. Most of the hardware divisions had been sold. At one time, I believe DEC had 25 manufacturing facilities in the U.S. They had a fleet of helicopters that used to ferry employees between plants throughout New England. So, Compaq only really wanted the field service people and nothing more and that is a big reason why Alpha died. If I remember correctly, the chip facility was in Hudson, Mass. I had heard a rumor that it was built on huge springs that kept the building from excessive vibrations that is vibrations from the rotation of the Earth. It took a lot to cut those wafers back in the day. Then you have the DCU. Had a branch in our facility. It was great. DEC was such a great place to work and they also really held to the open door policy where no office was allowed to have doors. Only conference rooms were allowed to have doors. Even the plant managers office did not have doors. Ken wanted an open atmosphere. I will concur, they day the board threw Ken under the bus was the day as they say, the music died. I really miss that place.

This brings back some very very happy memories of that time. I moved jobs and went from looking after HP-UX to a bunch of AlphaServers/AlphaStations. A couple of 1000s and 4000s and the horizontal alpha stations. Mostly of them ran Digital UNIX/Tru64 but we had another set with VMS as well for other things. Going from the HP-UX servers to the Alphas was one of the best times of my career, these things were such a joy to manage. The OS was fresh and modern, the hardware was so well built and easy to maintain. Plus,. for the size of machine they really really performed. The highlight though was the way Digital dealt with their customers. It really did feel like a different company even when it was in the early days of being owned by Compaq. Hardware problem? If you could tell them what it was (and they were good to diagnose) they'd happily ship out the part for you to fit yourself, even if it was server mainboard. If you weren't comfortable or sure of something? Sure we'll send an engineer to do it with you. I remember hitting an obscure OS/TruCluster problem at one point and their customer support went from 0-60 getting it through 1st and 2nd line support to 'you are now talking to someone from the kernel development group'. They were really a passionate bunch about Alpha and VMS/Digital UNIX/Tru64 and you'd find those engineers helping people out on the various newsgroups. I had one of the Digital UNIX key chains, 'CALIFORNIA Y W8 4 HP' (you can see one of them on the Tru64 UNIX web page). It was really sad to see it's decline and eventual death of their mentality within Compaq/HP. Oh and the DEC Alpha story isn't complete without mentioning AltaVista, which for me at the time was the only web search worth using. That was an incredible example at the time of what the could be done on the Alpha processors.

You have basically documented by computing work history. Each one of the points mentioned was a milestone in my working life. Thank you for the memories.

Mr Bytes you are quickly becoming one of my favourite channels. Thank you for these videos they are endlessly fascinating.

As a young boy, I read the computer magazines and lusted after hardware I could never conceivably afford. The Alpha machines were one I drooled over but never actually laid hands on. Now they're almost as expensive as new or more expensive in some cases.... Never to be I suppose.

Having fond memories of working on VAX/VMS, 780s, MicroVAX IIs, disk and tape stations, terminals, DCL, and VAXC. Those were the days. We got so much done for so many people on those. Amazing bang for the bucks. VAX and VMS were professional tools at a time PCs were still barely toys. Thankful for having had that experience. Cheers, Ken!

When I was at university in the late 90s and early 2000s, my university hosted our email on a VMS cluster. Very interesting OS. With my limited exposure, the biggest thing I remember is the built in versioning in the file system.

Alpha was an incredible platform. It reminds me of SGI in that it was way ahead of PC but finally failed commercially and was superseded by generally inferior PC.

I spent more than a decade working on the VAX with VMS developing applications for a mail order company. loved it and, looking back, I wished my time with the VAX could have been longer. This was one of the golden eras of computing. I really like the fact that Dec machines are still available and that there is a thriving community online that supports these machines and operating systems. In fact, I have a whole collection of VAX equipment in my workshop thanks to eBay and an early donation from a former DEC service tech.

Loved the video, as always. Did some DEC VAX back in the late 80's - upon a project to port ICL2903 PLAN assembler to DEC VAX C. Some salesperson thought it a migration could automate and well, fun times. The C development environment was neat and well-featured and the performance tools were pretty darn cutting edge for a long time.

This was a great watch, thanks for putting it together. One interesting side quest that you didn't cover was Alpha being massive in the HPC market because it blew pretty much anything else at the time right out of the water for raw Floating Point performance. I was a Physics postdoc in Forschungszentrum Juelich in Germany during the turn of the century. Many of us had DEC and Compaq (more of these) alpha workstations running TRU64 (as I recall we even had an early version of KDE running on them). More interestingly we had two Cray T3E supercomputers that were in the top 5 of the top500 list at the time. These had 512 Alphas inside them and we wrote massively parallel code to run on them. I think these actually ran UNICOS but my memory is getting hazy and we also had T90s and J90s so I might be mixing them up.

This is quickly becoming one of my favorite YT channels. Well done!

I'm a relatively new sub, and gotta say, your stuff is great! Usually I happen to jump on board channels the moment before they blow up in popularity, so I'm hoping that tend continues with you

Started my career as Alpha was coming in. FX/32! was really cool - it made AutoCAD run quite quick. I had an Alpha Station 225 that came with NT 4.0. I ditched that an installed Red Hat to run our main organisational DNS server. I even had a sticker on it: "Red Hat Screams on Alpha".

The PDP-11 was a 16-bit system. VAX's also ran a Unix derivative called Ultrix-32

Loved watching this, taking me back down memory lane. I’m a Longtime DEC user/owner from PDP 11/03 through VAX through VMS, Tru Unix, through to Alpha running NT 3.5 and NT 4.0. I’ve still got them all. Most importantly I still have my DEC coffee cup. If I’m going to be meeting with some of the old timers I make sure I pull out my DEC cup at the restaurant and get a fill of coffee. Although you covered the major steps along the way to the Alpha you stopped before getting to the Beowulf Cluster fad with a stack of Alphas. Thanks again.

I worked for Digital and Compaq. DEC had incredible products but it got a bit too complacent and didnt read where the market was going. They made the best products but it could have turned out differently with some better marketing and strategic direction (hindsight is a wonderful thing). There were amazing people working there and I owe a lot to them.

This was a really awesome video! Thanks so much for putting it together. I learned so much about DEC (especially that I probably shouldn't have tossed that old Alpha in the trash years ago). I also had NO idea about DCU and what it stood for!

Awesome video I don't think I've come across another video that covered the history so well. Thank you! I worked with OpenVMS for close to 30 years, love the OS It's being ported to x86 currently, first prod release due this year in fact (it's already out in field test) Some of the original developers came out of retirement to work on it They have already got it running on VMware, virtualbox and I think Xen already Lots of things planned for it too Google VMS vsi (vsi is the company who now owns the rights to keep developing OpenVMS)

The first computer I got to work on was a PDP8 at my high school, it was replaced by a PDP11. The Ritchie C book was one of our text books.This was in a day when there was only one computer in the school and barely anyone went near it. The fact that I got to work on it was because my father had a Telex machine and it had the same terminal and paper tape machine which one day broke down at school. I told the teacher I knew how to get it running and proceeded to clean it out and get it working like I did many times before. A week later the optical card reader stopped working and he asked if I knew how to fix it. I lied and said I did because I was sure it was only dirt keeping it from working and I was right. From then on when DEC came to work on the machine my teacher would call me down from whatever class I was in. DEC was only a mile from the school and they came often to try out things including giving us a tapes with the game StarTrek and UNIX on it that we would run on Fridays. Normally it ran a DEC business operating system. In college I picked a school that had and used VAX machines in the labs, at the time many computer/science courses did not have direct access to the computer and were still using punch cards, I did not want that. After school I joined a scientific company that was a DEC Var, I would travel out to customers and get the machines running, first thing I would do was get the ISDN up and log into DECNet. Sometimes I'd stay all night and other DEC people from around the world would help me solve any problems, the Aussie DEC reps were awesome and often helped late at night. This was still the 80s but by the 90s we were installing multiprocessor VMS machines with SGI front ends. Soon other Unix machines would join in and we had IBM and Apple AIX file servers and Sun. We used the first Macs as low cost/tiny footprint terminals, an early Mac was still less expensive than a DEC terminal and sometimes you could put one where nothing else fit. It wasn't until the Intel Pentium Pro dual socket board came out that we ever had use for a PC. Even the DEC Rainbows ran circles around any PC of its time. At one place I worked I was asked to add some new fonts to VMS and I looked up the running time and the machine hadn't been rebooted in a few years so I dug around and found the whereabouts of the guy who last booted the machine, he helped to review my changes and was quite helpful after hearing I was still running on his boot. Let me repeat that VMS had YEARS of UPTIME without rebooting! My first experience with Alpha NT and a mail server was watching a guy not able to apply a change because the monitor was too small to show the bottom of the window, when he resized the screen it wanted to reboot.

You've been doing this for 2 years?! How am I only finding this now!?! Awesome stuff! Dropping a sub and i'll soon be enjoying the backlog! I've been computing since the single digit mhz days, this is absolutely my jam!

Hey friend. I really appreciate your videos and find them invaluable. I work in the tech industry and have worked with a few people who worked at DEC in the 80's-90's. It's insightful to see and learn all of this, and the way you present it is perfect. Thank you, and keep up the good work!

So many memories brought back. I spent years working on DEC Alpha systems running OSF/1 then Tru64 (though almost never Windows NT) they were super systems. It was a sad day when Digital disappeared.

Wow, you brought back some memories! I lived within the DEC ecosystem for quite a bit of my tech career. I started off by working for Visual Technology who made emulating terminals that competed directly with DEC's products. Visual's products emulated the DEC VT100 directly but was also able to emulate other brands such as Lear-Siegler. Visual also had graphics products that emulated the DEC graphics terminals as well as the Tektronix models as well. These were quite popular and were quite fun to repair. A few years later, I worked for Infinet who I mentioned in a comment on your comms video. At Infinet, I ultimately ended up in MIS where I worked as a computer operator. Infinet had two VAX 11/780 clusters as well as an older 11/750 running ULTRIX. As time went on, they introduced a VAX 8350 to replace one of the VAX 11/780s. During this time, I got to know VMS pretty well and ended up learning Btrieve32 to build queries and reports during my non-operator time. For MIS tasks and operations, I used a DEC VT100 terminal, or a paper teletype console. They also had DEC Rainbows and I used one a few times for some programs including one to print out backup tape reel labels. Many years later, I used a VAX 4000 and a 6000. These were the last of the DEC VAXs I used and my use of VMS. This product while still DEC didn't feel the same. They were newer but felt tired and weren't quite as reliable as the old VAX 11/780s I ran at Infinet. Honestly and truthfully, the 11/780s were the height of DEC's quality. After that it was DEC's workstations at Polaroid. Polaroid Graphics Imaging (PGI) used both the DEC Alpha workstations and sold the DEC PC workstation products as RIP servers for their digital proofing products. I supported both products as part of the IT support group for that division. They both ran Windows NT at the time, and I remember the Alpha being a whole lot faster than the Intel PIII processor versions. There was a big fault, which I'm not sure you encountered with the workstations. When there were two hard drives placed in the drive-cage, the drives were so close that the magnetic field was felt when a drive was removed. The close spacing also caused drive failures due to the heat buildup in the case because there was little space for airflow in there with the drives so close. My relationship with DEC also came about because I live in the state where they were located and family and many friends worked there, Wang, Polaroid or Western Electric (Lucent/AT&T). The plant where the DEC Alpha chip was manufactured is still in use today. Located in Hudson Massachusetts, Intel now owns the facility and manufacturers various processors and controllers there. I knew a few people that work there as well. From what I remember, Compaq sold the Alpha and the facility to Intel back when they ditched the processor.

I was going to comment that the PBP-11 was 16 bit, but you already did so in your intro remarks. Great video, and great memories for a former DEC employee and PDP-11 programmer. Thank you.

Great video. One of my first ever machines I admin'd was a DEC Alphastation and I loved those things. They were unbelievably fast for the time. Tru64 was a bit funky but usable and I really enjoyed working with that whole platform.

I had a number of Alphas years after they were new. One was a dual 21264 CPU that I unfortunately never got working. Insane CPU modules the size of small cigar boxes. I remember hearing about the Alpha while in high school, with its CPU running at hundreds of megahertz while it was still pretty normal to have a 386 running Windows 3.1 so Alpha always had a mystical legendary feel to it. Even around the year 2000 Alpha was destroying seti-at-home an order of magnitude faster than top end PCs.

I had a DEC Personal Workstation running Window Maker on top of a Red Hat variant (iirc) as my daily driver from ~2000 - 2004. I really enjoyed it.

Fascinating stuff. Never came across one in the wild, and now I understand why. Thanks for this. Subscribed.

I always wanted to get my hands on one of these. Thanks for the history and breakdown -- I appreciate the hard work that went into this video!

I had a boss like Ken, and when he left it went from a environment to a routine ... I am still at that company and im not very happy

A fun fact is that the OG AMD Athlon was designed by many of the DEC Alpha's designers iirc.

Very informative! I thought I knew a lot about computers but all I knew about Digital/DEC was that I saw it on some terminals as a kid, but you both revealed and plugged that gap in knowledge. Good videos

just come across this one, best narration! thanx for the memory lane trip.. at DEC from 1972 till 1992, unforgettable times.

Not only was UNIX created on DEC machines, but the C programming language was created to make UNIX portable to the PDP-11.

My favorite story about how VAX was the CISC architecture par excellence is when I learned that it had an instruction (POLY) for evaluating a polynomial. I wondered how big of a polynomial they let you calculate, thinking "it's gotta be something reasonable, right? Just a quadratic, or maybe a cubic for a nice power of two. Four coefficients ought to be enough for anybody." Because this is a computing story that contains the phrase "N (things) ought to be enough for anybody," you'll have spotted already that I was wrong: the arguments to the POLY instruction are the argument to the polynomial, the degree of the polynomial, and a pointer to up to *thirty-two* coefficients. 😳 Apparently it wasn't used much, and not every VAX supported it fully, but still, absolute legend.

Great video. I worked as a system test and repair technician on PDP, Vax and alpha systems in the Digital plant in Ayr, Scotland. Great company and products. Watching stuff like this certainly brings very good memories . Many thanks

Love these looks at how things used to be. Look forward to future videos on a similar vein.

Nice treatment of DEC/Alpha. Very well presented. I'd love to see a similar video on Data General.

I have a very small museum of things from my 50 year association with Digital Equipment. Although I never actually worked for the company, "Uncle Ken's" culture informed much of my approach to computing and life in general. These include some early promotional material from the Alpha based systems. Perhaps some of the strangest things include different rubber overlays for the numeric keypad on the VT100 and VT200 keyboard. These were custom overlays when the soft keys were used by different applications such as an editor, although we always used to joke that they were to prevent the user from getting pregnant.

Great video, loving your content! Also fascinating reading all the comments here recounting good memories with DEC and Alpha, really seems a massive shame it all ended up like it did.

Been waiting for this one! As someone who still has to set up Micro focus Reflections for these things, it's fun to see a video on it.

0:53 The PDP-11 was considered “16-bit”, not “8-bit”. All the registers were 16 bits, remember.

The VT100 wasn't a dumb terminal, it was a "Smart" terminal. They communicated with the computer to determine cursor position and formatting etc

Another great video! very informative, and entertaining and well made keep up the good work.

OMG, this brings back lots of memories , has one of the best workflow envionments

The main thing I remember about Alpha was its 30 Watt power consumption and how high that seemed for a CPU then

I had a 533MHz 21164 version of this exact workstation back in the 90's, and you actually needed ALPHA compiled binaries for Windows NT programs to get any speed benefit, as when running x86 Windows NT applications on it required x86 jit translation, and contrary to what is said in this video (2x as fast or so), In my experience it was actually slower than using a contemporary Pentium based system/workstation/server instead. And unfortunately there were only a handful of alpha compiled Windows NT applications available... I had a special version of LightWave 3D for Windows NT/Alpha and used the workstation for rendering my 3D animations at speeds at least 2x to 3x as fast as a contemporary Pentium 180 MHz machine... After it became old and Intel machines were faster with Pentium III etc CPUs, I relegated it to my garage and turned it into an OpenBSD web/mail server over DSL for a small web/mail hosting company I was running from home in my spare time, and the thing stood in my dirty, dusty garage with a small UPS and it had an uptime of more than 6 years before I migrated all the web/pop/imap accounts to a new x86/freebsd rack unit at a hosting provider... Very well built machine indeed! :)

Thank you! Great summary; thanks for sharing! I had a unique view of DEC; I worked at DEC from 1977 to 1995. My mom and sister also worked there too. I grew up near the Maynard Mill, later on, lived on Thompson Street, 2 doors from the main entrance. Was part of the DECtalk and PC/Networking Group. I went from order entry file clerk to senior engineering manager and worked at many DEC sites. Until I left DEC, I did not realize how progressive and supportive they were of women in engineering.

Thanks. These DEC videos have really brought back some memories. In college at the University of Lowell in 1990 the Freshmen computer science students all had accounts on the DEC VAX 11/780 cluster (Cluster was named Woods, two of the servers were Aspen and Willow). Our assignments were all in Pascal on VMS. We had to learn LS Edit and other VMS tools. I remember one of the first things I did was put together a .com file that set up aliases for the stupidly wordy commands like aliasing CD for "SET DEFAULT" etc.

I was thrown into the deep end with DEC Alpha's and VMS clusters in 1999 doing a great deal of large scale SCADA systems (city water systems), they are excellent for mission critical systems and fun to work with and learn. Yes, we had to do a lot of Y2K stuff, was one of the reasons I got the job.

I had one of the Dec Workstations in the 90s, I remember running SETI@home on it when it came out and it was great. Also playing pinball on it with nt4. That was a fun box.

Thank you for sharing. This was great, nice job mate.

All those ports and slots and drives! What a wonderful peek back into the evolution of computer design! Nostalgic too. Kinda brings a tear to the eye *snif*

love these stories. brings back a lot of memories, like working on RSX-11 and RT-11 and getting down and dirty with hardware. I planned to get an alpha to port my OS to, but sadly my company life conspired against me... Now I tinker away on ARM

BTW, the first Alphas had a big design flaw: they were designed for scientific use but most of DEC's cistomers were business users. They had only implemented fiull 64 bit longword access and trying to access memory that was not on a 64 bit boundary caused a fault and pal code would then convert the memory access to a 64 but boundary and extract the desired results from it. This resulted in a huge performance penalty for business programs, especially those in COBOL that deal with a lot of strings. Subsequent Alpha chip was provided with ability to access memory without such penalty. With regards to drivers, one of the biggest challenges was that graphic card manufacturesr did not document their interfaces as they expect everyone to use their Windows drivers on x86. Digital engineers had to reverse engineer how each card worked and they needed to implement a mini x86 emulator at boot time because the card itself had x86 code that needed to run on the CPU to set registers etc. So getting drivers was NOT easy. (and to this day, Linux also has similar problems wioth graphic cards). When DEC built its own cards, it obviously knew the ful interface so was much easier for them to buidl drivers for them.

Wow. I've had a DCU account since I was a kid and it was serialized off my since passed away dad's account which means my member number for all these years has been his badge number and I never knew this until watching the video. That's a connection I never knew I had and it frankly got me a little emotional. Well done on the rest of the video a great tribute to a processor well ahead of its time that might have changed the world had one or two things gone a different way.

Very well done. Never worked for DEC, but certainly competed against them while at Data General 1982-1992 and Sun 1992-2001.I recall trying to meet Ken Olsen while manning the DG booth at Autofact in 1985. I went over to the DEC booth with my DG badge on, saw Ken, walked up to him and stuck my hand out and introduced myself. He started to reach for my hand, but when he saw my DG badge, he retracted this hand and turned around. A lot of bad blood between him and Ed DeCastro who worked for him at DEC and went on to found DG. I cut my teeth in the working world on a VAX 11/780 at Caterpillar. GREAT machines with very advanced Operating systems...VAX mail which allowed you to split the screen on a VT100 and communicated with another user on the system , for example.

Unbelievable to see this video. I was on this journey on the other end porting our EAM software to every variation DEC came up with (and every other Unix variance of competing vendors) .... all the way to Windows NT Aplha.. The best Port ever was the Tru64 Alpha... stable, reliable, and the quickest. How DEC squandered such a great system.

IBM bought PWC Consulting, not Arthur Andersen Consulting, which had bought itself out, and eventually rebranded as Accenture…but love the vids, keep then coming 😁👏🏻

Finally a comprehensive material on winderful DEC. Many thanks ;)

Your background music in this video is fabulous. And you tell a great story.

Back in the mid-90s, I worked on software that was pretty CPU-intensive and the state-of-the-art x86 processor clock speeds were around 250MHz. We bought a couple of Dec Alpha workstations that ran at a screaming 600MHz! They were amazing for the time.

I worked in the VMS operating systems group from 1987 to 1991, and worked on the port of VMS to the Alpha. I enjoyed working on the Alpha port, but it was becoming obvious by 1992 that in spite of it's technical merits the industry wasn't going to embrace it. The layoffs started in earnest in the following years and I left the company in 1993. When Compaq bought the company at the end of the 90s it was kinda sad. But I still use DCU as my bank decades later!

Great video about great times. Thank you making it. :)

I did not expect you to go into so much history, but I really enjoyed it. My time with the DEC Alpha was on Windows in 1997. I worked at a "Print Prepress" shop, back when you used to print off film (negatives), to create printing plates. Man that thing was fast. Our biggest printer could output a 34x44 negative, at 3000+ DPI, 4 color in less than an hour. That was fast actually. I mostly did pc and sun stuff outputting to AGFA AccuSet 1500 plus - including RIP. Yeah the days of < 10 meg ethernet. Thank you for putting together such an amazing video. @joefeser

Thank you for this video! Even managed to get my own Alpha Personal Workstation 500a out of the attic, hope it still works after close to ten years in storage 🤞Didn’t know that Ken Olsen was forced out of his own company. Why is it always the decent guys that get the boot? Anyway, DEC reminds me of a much more interesting time in computing.

I had the pleasure of restoring one of these things(Digital Personal Workstation 500au) to functional condition and I must say, the day when it booted Windows 2000 for the first time was a good day for me indeed. Love the sound hardware and its CPU is deceptively powerful - it will without too much complaint run MODERN windows programs! I also went through the trouble to track down a contemporary GPU but I can't find any drivers for it. Don't really have anything for it to do at the moment though.

Awwsome watch. Loving your work.

Well researched and for these computer kinds of videos, correct. You did a cracking job, you did.

Absolutely loved my DEC Alpha Machine (433mhz IIRC). Ran WinNT on it with Lightwave 3D and Video Action NT with a DPS Perception video board. WAY faster than any PC at that time. It's still sitting in my garage. Have no idea if I could get it to boot now or not.

I remember my "Sandpiper" workstation in the early 90s. Everyone else was ooh-aah about Windows 3.1 and I had a 64-bit computer with VMS. I had been a VMS developer since the Vaxen came out and RSX on PDP before that. I have a couple of the PWSs you showed in the video, but mine aren't in as nice of shape. I managed to get all my old files off the hard drives recently using a program called ods2reader cuz I couldn't remember how to get the TCP/IP on VMS to work!

Thank you for uploading this. I remember reading on Tru64 I still have some of those books somewhere

man. I had work to do and instead watching it all. THANKS! Now I have to go back to work!!!

Sweet, new video!

YES! I got my first Alpha workstation at the MIT swap meet they hold early in Cambridge MA in the late 90's. I had to lug that thing from the parking garage where they held it, to the train station, then to the bus station, then over 2 miles back to my house. 🙃 A few years later I went on to work at a place that built/specialized in Alpha Linux clusters right out of high school for $9/hr. 😜 Those were the days.

Great drive down memory lane. Thanks for sharing.

Another great video thanks. I was an application developer on VMS for a few years. After earlier roles developing in the likes of COBOL & APL on IBM S/370 TSO/SPF & VM/CMS and TRANSACT/IMAGE on HP3000 MPE, VMS with Fortran was a real breath of fresh air. It felt like the OS developers really understood the app developers’ point of view and how to make a real leap in effectiveness. Little things like default file versioning and big things like the ease and power of VMS DCL scripting. I then worked for a spell on Intergraph VAXes programming 3D graphics apps. Intergraph basically added graphics cards to standard VAXes and repackaged the systems in sleek black cabinets with more coloured flashing lights than could ever be explained. I remember being sent away on fun training courses at DEC offices like “Programming VAX/VMS internals using Fortran IV & 77” where I met DEC staff and felt the wholly different vibe compared to staff when I worked for a short while at IBM. Things got messier as the DEC PC “competitors” like DECstation and VAXstation came and went, clustering and networking exploded, and I was pulled into IBM SAS (stats) and SGI Irix 3D stuff. But to this day my fondest programming memories are on those VAX systems.

Alpha systems are very much still out there too. My company still runs them, albeit they are very close to the door and will be decom'd in the next year or so but they are still there (GS1280's if I remember)

I seem to remember DEC Alpha workstation ads heavily pushed in 3D and video magazines of the time. A lot of 3D animation was being done on Alphas because rendering was so much faster and I believe models could be more complex as well. I wanted one and I'm sad that DEC went kaput. I once wrote a short story where DEC won the processor war and the world now ran on DEC Delta processors.

My first job, an OSF/1 workstation with an Alpha processor. A long way from it. Great video.

Thanks for this video. Informative and entertaining, a great combination.