There are several Debian Alpha ISO images available: http://archive.debian.org/debian/dists/etch/main/installer-alpha https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/archive/5.0.10/alpha/iso-cd https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/2020-08-19/ https://wiki.qemu.org/Documentation/Platforms/Alpha https://www.debian.org/ports/alpha/ https://www.debian.org/releases/woody/alpha And Gentoo Linux: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Alpha/FAQ There is also NetBSD: https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-9.0/alpha And OpenBSD: http://www.openbsd.org/alpha.html And FreeBSD: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/6.0R/hardware-alpha.html We ran DEC OSF/1 until the power supplies on our several Alpha systems died, but it had an annual license fee, and the O/S shutdown when the license expired. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 - - University of Utah FAX: +1 801 581 4148 - - Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB Internet e-mail: beebe(a)math.utah.edu - - 155 S 1400 E RM 233 beebe(a)acm.org beebe(a)computer.org - - Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On 9/18/2020 8:26 PM, Paul Riley wrote: Absolutely! The CS Dept. at UC Berkeley got some of the first Alphas released by DEC back in the 90s (I don't remember the exact dates). We ran OSF/1 (a.k.a. Digital Unix, a.k.a other names). In fact, what became PostgreSQL was developed on Alphas running that Unix. Jon

Nelson H. F. Beebe <beebe(a)math.utah.edu> wrote: Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote: License managers now count as DRM, under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (though no such laws had been passed when the license managers were first created). So: is it worth breaking the law in many countries, to maintain a historical curiosity? Personally, I would throw DRM-encrusted software, and the hardware that is dependent on it, into the dustbin of history. Its creators had fair warning that they were making their products unusable after they stopped caring to maintain them. They didn't care about their place in history, nor about their users. They did it anyway, for short-term profit and to harass those people foolish enough to be their customers. Their memes should not be passed to future generations. As Sir Walter Scott suggested in another context, they "doubly dying, shall go down, to the vile dust, from whence [they] sprung, unwept, unhonour'd, and unsung". John