I can see an Alpha, but why would you want a wacko architecture created by Intel? It's not as if they have any track record of designing nice CPU architectures. paul

Wow, I *may* have jumped too soon in deciding to let my DEC gear go! Realistically, and sadly, though, it isn?t likely to get used even with a new programme in place. I?m glad there?s something planned out for continuity, though. It means I can hopefully still putz with VMS in SimH if I need to revisit it. Alphas are getting a smidge rare, seem to be more parts around these days than whole units. Itanium systems you are limited to supported HP Integrity units. There don?t seem to be a lot of those around at an acceptable price point in this neck of the woods either, they are currently in that horrible ?someone in Enterprise might give us a huge pile of notes for this if they are desperate? price band. Itanium wasn?t Intel?s idea, it was HP?s s far as I know, it originated as the EPIC architecture. They turned to Intel to assist in developing it because the climate at the time made developing it in-house untenable (it was around the time when. Explains why HP clung to it for so long! As a side-note, you?ll notice Intel actually bailed on using it in anything but HPC and specialist applications in 2004 be implementing EM64t (amd64) on P4s and Xeons instead (mostly leant on by Microsoft, no doubt). As far as VMS goes, aside from it?s slightly fierce power consumption, a zx6000 with a Radeon 7000 PCI video card does run VMS really well indeed. Until VMS hits x86_64, Itanium is essentially the pinnacle of OpenVMS hardware in terms of performance. Makes for a good room heater too. ? Mark Benson

On Wed, 22 Apr 2020, Robert Armstrong wrote: My DS10 isn't *too* bad, but power consumption is why I retired my VAX 4000/90A and virtualized it to SIMH. I still have the 90A (stored inside, in my main tech closet..) , as it was my first VAX. I had a VLC at one point and should have tried to repair it, sent it to another collector/hobbyist for repair, from my recollection had power supply trouble. I'm hoping it was repaired and found a good home as an area router. :) This is also why some of my other retro systems aren't running 24/7, or I need to get-around-to putting a kill-a-watt on them so I can do some math and see how much they will spin my meter off the base. ;) Fred

On 4/22/20 3:53 PM, Robert Armstrong wrote: Wow. Bob I think you and I have very, very different ideas of "high power consumption". ;) -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA

On 4/22/20 4:02 PM, Robert Armstrong wrote: I do, but it has its own building, with its own power bills. What the actual fuck?! I UP AND MOVED when the power got too expensive in Florida, as it started to hit 14 cents! I pay about 10.5 here, but that's commercial rates. I had no idea it was that bad where you are. I'm really sorry to hear it. It's time to move, man. Wow. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA

On 4/22/20 4:48 PM, Robert Armstrong wrote: No insult intended, but it really doesn't sound like it. (besides, it's dangerous, everything causes cancer there!) My epiphany in Florida was a simple and logical one. I have a certain lifestyle; it involves things of high mass, large size, and high power consumption. (minicomputers, mainframes, and laboratory equipment) Further, I'm a person for whom "room temperature" is about 65 degrees F, and I have a very narrow thermal "comfort range". When I sleep, I want it to be about 61 degrees F in the bedroom. (amazingly my wife's thermal preferences are the same as mine!) In Florida, I was living in an area where both space and power were very expensive. (nowhere near the insanity that is California, but still) The outdoor temperature rarely dropped below 85 degrees F in the summer, even in the evenings, and in the winter it's not much better, high 70s. Everything (EVERYTHING) I do in my life generates heat that I have to pay to have removed. In Florida, with very little hardware running (one rack of servers), in a 2300 square foot house, my power bill was about $700 per month, year round. In Pennsylvania, in my main building (not the museum building), only one floor of which is fully climate controlled (and that one floor is 6,000 square feet), my power bills rarely hit $250/mo. And I'm running some old iron (just for me personally, apart from the museum) 24/7, including two small VAXen and a PDP-11/83, a serious Ethernet switch (Cisco 6503) and a few servers. In other words, I now live in a place that actually matches my lifestyle. Nobody seems to think that way, and I can't understand why. It pains me to think that I went through the first 41 years of my life (I'm 51 now) living miserably in places where I just did not fit. (Yes yes yes, this is off-topic, but only marginally, and hell, we are social creatures living in forced isolation due to a pandemic, and we are all friends.) -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA

There is an Open Source project to emulate the Alpha, but I honestly can?t figure out where it?s at. Here is the link to it. https://gitlab.com/JonathanBelanger/DECaxp Zane

Mark - I did actually bid on the alpha box you were offering and may have asked what sort of price you were thinking about for the itanium box too but, long story short, my email to you probably ended up in your gmail spam folder thanks to my email server deciding to route google mail over IPv6 and I hadn't put enough of the DNS records in place for IPv6 addresses. Ah well. I'm happy enough with SIMH VAX at the moment. Keith -----Original Message----- From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE [mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE] On Behalf Of Mark Benson Sent: 22 April 2020 19:10 To: <hecnet at update.uu.se> <hecnet at Update.UU.SE> Subject: Re: [HECnet] Apparently good news from VSI Wow, I *may* have jumped too soon in deciding to let my DEC gear go! Realistically, and sadly, though, it isn?t likely to get used even with a new programme in place. I?m glad there?s something planned out for continuity, though. It means I can hopefully still putz with VMS in SimH if I need to revisit it. Alphas are getting a smidge rare, seem to be more parts around these days than whole units. Itanium systems you are limited to supported HP Integrity units. There don?t seem to be a lot of those around at an acceptable price point in this neck of the woods either, they are currently in that horrible ?someone in Enterprise might give us a huge pile of notes for this if they are desperate? price band. Itanium wasn?t Intel?s idea, it was HP?s s far as I know, it originated as the EPIC architecture. They turned to Intel to assist in developing it because the climate at the time made developing it in-house untenable (it was around the time when. Explains why HP clung to it for so long! As a side-note, you?ll notice Intel actually bailed on using it in anything but HPC and specialist applications in 2004 be implementing EM64t (amd64) on P4s and Xeons instead (mostly leant on by Microsoft, no doubt). As far as VMS goes, aside from it?s slightly fierce power consumption, a zx6000 with a Radeon 7000 PCI video card does run VMS really well indeed. Until VMS hits x86_64, Itanium is essentially the pinnacle of OpenVMS hardware in terms of performance. Makes for a good room heater too. ? Mark Benson

Our roof wouldn?t hold more than 14 panels - so I put 14 of them in 2012. They do 240W each in bright sunlight, on good summer days 3KW for free over a large part of the day ... was all good but now I have the *real* 3100-80 going full steam for two weeks now ... we shall see --- Supratim Sanyal, W1XMT 39.19151 N, 77.23432 W QCOCAL::SANYAL via HECnet

Very interesting Thomas, thanks for sharing. You can of course program an Alpha using VAX Macro-32, as a compiled language, if that is your kind of thing. Regards, Mark From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE <owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE> On Behalf Of Thomas DeBellis Sent: 22 April 2020 23:59 To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE Subject: Re: [HECnet] Apparently good news from VSI Why, indeed. I think after you've programmed enough assembler, you find things to like and detest about all of them. So I've done BAL-360, PDP-10, PDP-11, PDP-8, Intel 80286 and up as well as VAX and Alpha. There were others. Which one did I like most? Why, the ones I got paid to work on, of course. After that, what mattered was how friendly the development environment was and in that regard, the 360 really drove me crazy; very poor non-interactive debugging tools (at the time). The PDP-10's debugger was wonderful as well as the instruction set and a reasonable amount of registers. The PDP-8 mimicked that to a certain extent, so the fact that there is only one accumulator presented an interesting challenge. Ditto my experience with the 11. I honestly don't remember enough VAX assembler to comment meaningfully on it. Passing to the Intel chips, I would really say it mattered what development tools you used. Microsoft's show the Macro-10 heritage and the Codeview debugger was completely reasonable. There were a number of things that bothered me, but the register file wasn't one of them; not after the PDP-8. The segmented memory model never bothered me at all; not when it offered half a gigabyte of virtual address space on the 286 (2**13 selectors * 64K). As a matter of fact, I thought it was great because it gave more granularity than guard pages, which is all you can use on the VAX, Alpha and PDP-10. But really, only a real nerd (like me) would care about any of this. Otherwise, you really can't tell; not in most high level languages. And I think Linus probably said it best when he noted that the Intel chips were so fast that register scheduling really didn't matter. It's true, particularly because behind the curtain it's doing register score-boarding. You might want to check out AMD's 64 bit extensions to the 80x86 ISA; I've taught that assembler and it's quite reasonable, particularly if you are not using the arcane AT&T syntax: 16 registers and more flexibility in using them; very close to the VAX and PDP-10. I miss PushA, though. Or maybe I like x86-64 because I got paid to use it. Really, Paul; this is a matter of personal taste more than anything else--I don't think it's possible to decide anything more than what you like... _____ On 4/22/20 9:44 AM, Paul Koning wrote: I can see an Alpha, but why would you want a wacko architecture created by Intel? It's not as if they have any track record of designing nice CPU architectures. paul _____ On Apr 22, 2020, at 9:30 AM, Keith Halewood <mailto:Keith.Halewood at pitbulluk.org> <Keith.Halewood at pitbulluk.org> wrote: I might actually go out and buy a cheap alpha or itanic at some point now?.. if such things exist.

On Fri, Apr 24, 2020 at 12:37 PM Tim Sneddon <tim at sneddon.id.au> wrote: wrote: Keith.Halewood at pitbulluk.org> wrote: now?.. if such things exist. by Intel? It's not as if they have any track record of designing nice CPU architectures. is just VMS as usual. The stuff where you start needing to touch the hardware is interesting or if you worked on compilers can certainly make you feel like a different person. originally called PA-WW (for Wide Word). HP brought Intel to the "party" and everybody was on board for a while. However, around 2000/2001 when the majority of the world realised what a heap it was, HP clung to it because it was their baby. I did mean to include this link too: https://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/epic.html Regards, Tim.