Quote:
Originally Posted by flainn
DEC also had one of the most exciting processor architectures seen in a long time -- the Alpha -- which was unfortunately bought by Compaq, then by HP, and then killed.
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You mean it was better than a PDP 8
I cut my teeth on a PDP8 in 1974 and it was nearing the end of its life cycle at that point. It was a 12 bit machine with 4K of core memory and a HUMONGOUS
6MB drive. We used a teletype as a terminal and had to boot it by toggling in the bootstrap routine one instruction at a time. It also had a 144 instruction page structure that was very limiting. I was doing peripheral hardware designs, but had to put together test routines in the machine code.
There's probably more processing power in a toaster these days.
The Alpha was coming in as Bill Gates was in the process of taking over the world.