Digital Equipment Corporation - AlphaServer 300 4/266

This year I missed VCF Midwest in Chicago.  I had a really great time last year and I was disappointed to miss out.  One of the retro collectors I know from Free Geek Twin Cities was willing to set aside several of the machines that he was planning to sell there.  You'll be hearing more about these computers on my bLog as I work my way down the stack.  The first in the series is a Digital Equipment Corporation Alpha Server 300 4/266.  This line was released in 1995 and this particular machine dates from 1996 or 1997.  It's one of the lower end from the Alpha Server line, but given the desktop form factor it should perform nicely as a workstation.

I've always wanted a RISC Windows NT machine ever since they were new.  When I bought this machine I was thinking that it may have been limited to run VMS or True64 Unix, but I was willing to purchase it anyway because VMS is also quite nostalgic for me, as that was the OS that was running on our VAX cluster back in my college days at MSOE.

As usual I started my intake process with some cleaning and inspection.  I was surprised when I opened the case and found a Matrox Millennium II PCI card and a Sound Blaster 32 ISA Sound Card in the machine, I didn't know that these were supported.  The machine was really clean inside.  I was happy to find an enterprise grade SCSI HDD (hopefully less likely to die soon) and fully populated RAM slots (which ended up being 256MB of RAM).  The HDD had a sticker on it indicating that the drive had been wiped at Free Geek at some point.  The machine also needed a new clock battery, but this machine uses a standard CR2032 so that was an easy fix.  After that the machine was clean and there were no loose parts and connections, so it was ready for a first boot.  

The machine booted for me, and just as I had been told it was coming up to a prompt:
>>>>
After some reading I learned that this is the Alpha's ROM prompt. 

I started googling around and reading about this machine.  As you may know Alpha was a short lived platform and it was sold off (killed) after Compaq acquired DEC.  The main software architect of Windows NT, Dave Cutler, was previously a Digital employee who was a member of the Vax / VMS software team.  I think there's a pretty convincing argument to be made that Alpha was the primary target platform for Windows NT during it's early development at Microsoft with x86 being a runner up.  It's interesting to think about how things might have turned out differently if Digital would have been able to reinvent itself.

But back to this machine.  One of the first items I encountered was this document, a procedure for installing Windows NT.  I was anxious to try it out since I didn't know if this would work or not.  I found a Windows NT 4.0 disk image on WinWorld and got to work.  In hindsight, if you are doing this, you will want to also download the full ISO CD version of Service Pack 6.  It has additional files that are not available in the self extracting EXE version of the last Service Pack and it's helpful when looking for drivers to be able to have both the entire Windows NT installer and the entire uncompressed SP6 on the local hard drive.

I struggled getting a driver installed for the Matrox Millennium graphics card.  After reading a bit on the forums, I planed another trip to Free Geek.  My contact at Free Geek set me up with an S3 video card from 1995.  I was concerned that this was not "specialized' hardware, but in hindsight this machine does not require specialized hardware, as it came right up at boot time.  Windows NT Plug and Play recognized the S3 video card on boot and I had 256 colors for the first time since working on the machine!

Getting Audio working was also a bit of a pain with lots of trial and error, but I think having both the NT installer files and the SP6 files on the hard drive would have avoided most of the difficulty.  The key enabler for getting this card to work was that ISA cards don't have Plug and Play out of the box.  On the NT install CD ROM Extras there is an installer for ISA PnP. After installing this and restarting the machine the ISA sound card is found at startup.  I ended up having to move the card to the bottom ISA slot and to manually assign resources (Default Resources 0000) too the card, but after a couple of restarts the sound card is working in Windows NT!

So, in hindsight, I think the trick is to use only hardware that is on the Windows NT 4.0 Hardware Compatibility List.  I had trouble finding a readable version of this document on the web, so I'm including a link here to an Archive.  Perhaps it's good that I didn't find this doucment till later as the AlphaServer 300 is not on the HCL.  Still, after many hours of runtime the machine is stable and running well with zero hangs or bluescreens.

I'm quite pleased with how this machine turned out paired with a large CRT monitor.  Being that these machines were so expensive at the time and were often used for art or engineering they were often paired with larger CRTs...

The entire appeal of these machines at the time was that they were faster than the x86 machines of the time.  How much faster is I suppose a matter of debate but loading this up with period correct software like MS Office, VB 6.0, Visual C++ 4.0, and other tools, it does seem quite a bit faster than Pentium PCs of the era, although I'm sure a good part of that is the benefit of a fast wide SCSI bus vs. IDE.