In the middle of last year an interesting workstation computer came up for sale on Facebook Marketplace here in my area. The Compaq Professional Workstation XP1000 is an Alpha based workstation from just after Compaq purchased Digital Equipment Corporation. The Facebook Markeplace ad stated that it was stopping on a boot screen and that it might not be working, but the price was low enough that I thought it was worth the risk of not being able to repair it.
Once I got the system home I was able to verify that the system was in the condition described and then started to read what I could find about this computer. I soon discovered that the motherboard had a password installed on it. In the PC world we would call this a BIOS password, but for an Alpha machine like this, it's the SRM console password. The SRM console uses a command line but with it locked out even the help command was generating an error "Console is secure. Please login.". Because PCs have a jumper to reset this I was quite hopeful that it would just be a matter of time till I figured out how to reset that password but after not finding much documentation online I decided to ask for help on the Vintage Computer Federation Forums.
As usual there were several people who were a big help there, including one gentleman that uploaded some documentation to the thread that I had not been able to find online anywhere else. Sadly, though, we did NOT discover a backdoor designed by Compaq to reset the console password. Although I could not find an explicit statement for this motherboard I did learn that were other machines designed by Compaq that did not contain a back door, if the password is lost, the main logic board containing the firmware must be replaced. So I decided to put the project on hold and keep the machine. I setup a saved search on eBay since you never know what will pop up there and didn't think much about this project in the second half of last year.
At the end of last year I gave quite a bit of thought to my Vintage Computing hobby. I purged alot of my project machines, selling, donating to Free Geek, or recycling responsibly. I also went through my wish lists and eBay saved searches and purged items that were no longer of interest and I discovered that I had setup the wrong search, adding an extra zero. When I fixed the saved search I was shocked to learn that there was a logic board on eBay for sale! I watched the item for a while and eventually made an offer that was accepted.
The board shipped from Israel so it took a while to get here but once it arrived I was able to pull my machine completely apart. I used this as an opportunity to do some much needed dusting inside the case of this machine. It was a huge relief when the system started back up after re-assembly and an even bigger relief when I was able to use the SRM console and issue commands to boot an Operating System off an Installation Disk!
Once I could start to explore, I learned that this was one of the newer XP1000 machines. This machine can run the VMS operating systems and Unix like systems, but not Windows NT. The older, slower machines could boot NT, but I already have one Alpha machine setup that way. I know at least one DEC hardware enthusiast who will be glad to see the machine running DEC software and not Microsoft software.
I had some old media for OpenVMS which I had burned while I was a part of the Community Licensing program, but that program has ended now. I was able to install OpenVMS 8 on the hardware, but without licenses it's not very interesting or useful. After searching on the Internet and reading for a bit, I learned that the archived version of Tru64 Unix on WinWorld has keys with the archive, so I gave that a try, and it worked well.
Configuring networking was a bit of a challenge, but I ended up getting that working with a Static IP and now the computer can read articles on FrogFind.com and 68k.news just fine. I'm quite happy with how the machine turned out...
I was disappointed that I couldn't load older software on here. I have been looking for some VAX hardware since that is what we used back in College, I remember the Motif Window Manager and that was such an interesting look and feel, but I didn't know that Motif was the precursor to the Common Desktop Environment (CDE). Because of multiple vendors working together on this more open code base this Compaq (Digital Equipment) machine will join several others CDE machines that I have including IBM AIX, Sun Solaris, and SGI Irix.
