Digital DEC Alpha Personal Workstation 433a

Описание: A guided tour of the Dec Alpha PWS 433a, created as a tribute to Neil's wonderful Retro Man Cave channel. Sadly I couldn't finish the video in time for it to be part of his daily stream during covid-19 lockdown, but here it is nonetheless.

The PWS was Digital's swan song before the company was bought out by Compaq and later gutted by HP.
The Alpha processor that powered it was at the time the fastest microprocessor in the world, and the PWS was architectured to reuse as many X86 PC components as possible to limit cost of ownership instead of relying on DEC proprietary hardware. The result is somewhat quirky, with notorious bugs crippling the infamous Pyxis chipset, but in 1997 it was a formidable workstation ; even this absolute barebone, base model could outrun the (then) top of the line Pentium II Xeon 450 and the price was really tight, below $10.000.

Ultimate claim to fame, after windows support was officially dropped, Microsoft used Alpha stations and servers in house to develop its 64 bits version of the OS.

Long after its demise, the DEC PWS remains one of the easiest classic Risc Unix workstation to work on, as it supports natively Tru64 Unix, OpenVMS, Linux, and Windows on relatively inexpensive PC hardware.

Many thanks to Miod who's been helping me keeping this machine in working condition.