[TUHS] Unix on DEC AlphaServer 4000

[David Arnold]

I worked at a Digital-sponsored lab in Australia from the early 90’s. DEC offered us a great deal on DEC 3000-era workstations, replacing all our Ultrix DECstations in (I think) 1994.

At that point, very little of the freely available software would build cleanly for 64 bit platforms. Even the stuff with Cray support often didn’t work with OSF/1’s 32 bit int/64 bit long model. 

And pthreads was a mess, with all the Unix-like systems having implementations of different drafts that were incompatible. 

After a while Digital started redistributing a “freeware” collection of suitably patched versions to bootstrap everyone’s workflows. 




d


> On 19 Sep 2020, at 14:34, Jon Forrest <nobozo at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> On 9/18/2020 8:26 PM, Paul Riley wrote:
>> I have an opportunity to buy a DEC AlphaServer. Is there a version of Unix which will run on this?
> 
> 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
>