As some of you may know, I restore old / antique computers for a museum. This server straddles the line between old and antique, as it is almost 25 years old.
Build’s Name: AlphaServer DS20
Operating System/ Storage Platform: OpenVMS 8.4-2L1
CPU: Alpha 21264 500MHz EV6 (x2)
Motherboard: AlphaServer DS20
Chassis: AlphaServer DS20 (is this getting repetitive yet?)
Drives: 4 * 73GB 15K LVD SCSI, 3 * 36GB 10K LVD SCSI, IDE CD-ROM, 3.5" floppy
RAM: 2GB (16 * 128MB DIMMs, proprietary form factor)
Add-in Cards: ELSA GLoria Synergy VGA, DEGX2-TA (dual Broadcom BCM5704 Gigabit Ethernet), CIPCA (proprietary dual 70Mbit/sec coax cluster interconnect), 3X-KZPEA-DB (Adaptec 39160 dual Ultra SCSI)
Power Supply: Dual 675W (proprietary)
Other Bits: Dual 9-pin serial ports, 25-pin parallel port, PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports
This is actually the same exact system I bought back in 1999 when I was managing the computer systems at SPC. I tracked it down through subsequent owners and managed to re-acquire it from the most recent owner, where it had been sitting unused in a damp basement for over 10 years.
It had developed a number of faults over the years and just spewed error messages when first powered on. I had to replace all of the disk drives as they had assorted faults - wouldn't spin up, reported lots of bad sectors, or completely hung the SCSI bus. The SCSI CD-ROM would immediately eject when the tray was closed (a common problem with that model) and its dedicated SCSI controller was what caused the console errors on power-up. I replaced the drive, controller and cable with an IDE CD-ROM (from another AlphaServer system, so it has a matching dark blue-grey color with the rest of the cabinet) and IDE cable to the undocumented IDE port on the motherboard. I also added the second 1GB of RAM (8 DIMMs!), the second power supply, the second CPU, the dual Gigabit Ethernet card (replacing the factory-supplied single port 10/100 card), and the CIPCA cluster card (and its unobtainium external cable).
The disks are "shadowed" (the OpenVMS term for disk mirroring) in pairs. So there are 4 logical drives available to VMS - 3 shadowsets and a single un-shadowed 36GB drive. This is important because disks of that era (ST373455LC and ST336704LCV) get pretty tempermental these days.
It uses PCI (not PCI Express, plain old PCI) and has 6 64-bit 33MHz PCI slots, one of which is a shared PCI / ISA slot.
The ELSA GLoria Synergy VGA card is a specific card that the AlphaServer firmware knows about, and if you have a PS/2 keyboard and mouse handy you can say "set console graphics" to use those as the console. Most OpenVMS installations used the serial console ("set console serial") so the system could be managed from a terminal server, even if it wasn't running an operating system. The card is also supported by DECwindows Motif, which is an X11 + Motif environment available under OpenVMS.
Once I had the hardware in tip-top shape, I installed the latest OpenVMS Alpha operating system (from 2016), TCP/IP (from 2020), a bunch of language compilers (ADA, BASIC, Bliss32, C, C++, COBOL, Fortran, Pascal, and PL/I) and a bunch of other software (DECwindows Motif, DECnet Phase IV, VMScluster, Volume Shadowing, DECset, Diagnose and Document) and finished the software setup.
This computer can also run OSF/1 (the DEC / Compaq / HPE Unix flavor, renamed to Tru64) and Windows NT 4.0, though most customers back then were running OpenVMS (if you wanted to run a Unix or NT system, there were much less expensive systems available).
There's actually a reasonably decent 32-bit x86 emulator built in. From the console (this system uses a serial port), you can access the x86 BIOS ROMs in expander cards. For example, to get into the Adaptec on-board menus you would say "run bios pka0:". The system briefly displays a mapping between what function keys a BIOS would expect and the keys available on a serial terminal. Pretty esoteric.
The "Open" in OpenVMS got tacked on in 1992 to imply that the operating system was POSIX-compatible. I don't know what tests they ran to make that determination, but there are all sorts of traps when porting *ix software. A few off the top of my head are that poll() only works on network sockets and not other devices, and the threads implementation is quite different from anything else (and definitely not lightweight). This has made the porting of popular software such as Perl and Apache problematic. Those ports (and many others) were done by the Herculean efforts of unpaid volunteers.
The original base system price was ~ $22,000 (1999 dollars, roughly $40,000 as of 2023)
The price as currently configured would have been ~ $72,000 (1999 dollars, roughly $130,000 as of 2023)
I've been asked if this system actually runs, so here's the proof:
Amusingly, the specs for the AlphaServer DS20 are still available from the HPE web site here. HPE is where this product line ended up. It started at DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) which was bought by Compaq which in turn was bought by HP, which subsequently split itself in two parts, the one of interest being HPE). I jokingly refer to this "follow the bouncing ball" as HPaqital.
Build’s Name: AlphaServer DS20
Operating System/ Storage Platform: OpenVMS 8.4-2L1
CPU: Alpha 21264 500MHz EV6 (x2)
Motherboard: AlphaServer DS20
Chassis: AlphaServer DS20 (is this getting repetitive yet?)
Drives: 4 * 73GB 15K LVD SCSI, 3 * 36GB 10K LVD SCSI, IDE CD-ROM, 3.5" floppy
RAM: 2GB (16 * 128MB DIMMs, proprietary form factor)
Add-in Cards: ELSA GLoria Synergy VGA, DEGX2-TA (dual Broadcom BCM5704 Gigabit Ethernet), CIPCA (proprietary dual 70Mbit/sec coax cluster interconnect), 3X-KZPEA-DB (Adaptec 39160 dual Ultra SCSI)
Power Supply: Dual 675W (proprietary)
Other Bits: Dual 9-pin serial ports, 25-pin parallel port, PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports
This is actually the same exact system I bought back in 1999 when I was managing the computer systems at SPC. I tracked it down through subsequent owners and managed to re-acquire it from the most recent owner, where it had been sitting unused in a damp basement for over 10 years.
It had developed a number of faults over the years and just spewed error messages when first powered on. I had to replace all of the disk drives as they had assorted faults - wouldn't spin up, reported lots of bad sectors, or completely hung the SCSI bus. The SCSI CD-ROM would immediately eject when the tray was closed (a common problem with that model) and its dedicated SCSI controller was what caused the console errors on power-up. I replaced the drive, controller and cable with an IDE CD-ROM (from another AlphaServer system, so it has a matching dark blue-grey color with the rest of the cabinet) and IDE cable to the undocumented IDE port on the motherboard. I also added the second 1GB of RAM (8 DIMMs!), the second power supply, the second CPU, the dual Gigabit Ethernet card (replacing the factory-supplied single port 10/100 card), and the CIPCA cluster card (and its unobtainium external cable).
The disks are "shadowed" (the OpenVMS term for disk mirroring) in pairs. So there are 4 logical drives available to VMS - 3 shadowsets and a single un-shadowed 36GB drive. This is important because disks of that era (ST373455LC and ST336704LCV) get pretty tempermental these days.
It uses PCI (not PCI Express, plain old PCI) and has 6 64-bit 33MHz PCI slots, one of which is a shared PCI / ISA slot.
The ELSA GLoria Synergy VGA card is a specific card that the AlphaServer firmware knows about, and if you have a PS/2 keyboard and mouse handy you can say "set console graphics" to use those as the console. Most OpenVMS installations used the serial console ("set console serial") so the system could be managed from a terminal server, even if it wasn't running an operating system. The card is also supported by DECwindows Motif, which is an X11 + Motif environment available under OpenVMS.
Once I had the hardware in tip-top shape, I installed the latest OpenVMS Alpha operating system (from 2016), TCP/IP (from 2020), a bunch of language compilers (ADA, BASIC, Bliss32, C, C++, COBOL, Fortran, Pascal, and PL/I) and a bunch of other software (DECwindows Motif, DECnet Phase IV, VMScluster, Volume Shadowing, DECset, Diagnose and Document) and finished the software setup.
This computer can also run OSF/1 (the DEC / Compaq / HPE Unix flavor, renamed to Tru64) and Windows NT 4.0, though most customers back then were running OpenVMS (if you wanted to run a Unix or NT system, there were much less expensive systems available).
There's actually a reasonably decent 32-bit x86 emulator built in. From the console (this system uses a serial port), you can access the x86 BIOS ROMs in expander cards. For example, to get into the Adaptec on-board menus you would say "run bios pka0:". The system briefly displays a mapping between what function keys a BIOS would expect and the keys available on a serial terminal. Pretty esoteric.
The "Open" in OpenVMS got tacked on in 1992 to imply that the operating system was POSIX-compatible. I don't know what tests they ran to make that determination, but there are all sorts of traps when porting *ix software. A few off the top of my head are that poll() only works on network sockets and not other devices, and the threads implementation is quite different from anything else (and definitely not lightweight). This has made the porting of popular software such as Perl and Apache problematic. Those ports (and many others) were done by the Herculean efforts of unpaid volunteers.
The original base system price was ~ $22,000 (1999 dollars, roughly $40,000 as of 2023)
The price as currently configured would have been ~ $72,000 (1999 dollars, roughly $130,000 as of 2023)
I've been asked if this system actually runs, so here's the proof:
Amusingly, the specs for the AlphaServer DS20 are still available from the HPE web site here. HPE is where this product line ended up. It started at DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) which was bought by Compaq which in turn was bought by HP, which subsequently split itself in two parts, the one of interest being HPE). I jokingly refer to this "follow the bouncing ball" as HPaqital.
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