At 01:39 PM 4/30/2009, you wrote: >Mark Wendt (Contractor) wrote: > > > > Did you ever get to play around with the Alpha machines? >Oh, sure! We converted over to all Alphas, maybe about 1995? > >One big problem we had was the difference in the stack calling frame >between VAX and Alpha. >On the VAX, the first word in the frame was the argument count. Alpha >got rid of that, and we had TONS of code that had been written for a >variable number of arguments. We had to recode a lot of stuff. Also, >after the compiler had re-strung the instruction order to optimize the >load/store sequence, it became a bit hard to know what line of code the >error happened on. > >We never had big Alpha systems, only a variety of desktop-size >machines. They were still a lot faster that even mainframe VAXes. >Well, the Pentium 2, 3 and 4 incorporate some of the CPU technology of >the Alpha. They are still held back by the AWFUL accretion of an >instruction set, though. > >Jon
I sysadmin'd a bunch of those behemoth Alpha 8400's. They really were a joy to administer. DEC did those ones right - we hardly ever had any hardware maintenance to worry about. Clustering was a wunnerful thing for system(s) uptime, especially on critical production machines. Too bad they let that all slip away. You are talking about CISC, right? ;-) Mark ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Register Now & Save for Velocity, the Web Performance & Operations Conference from O'Reilly Media. Velocity features a full day of expert-led, hands-on workshops and two days of sessions from industry leaders in dedicated Performance & Operations tracks. Use code vel09scf and Save an extra 15% before 5/3. http://p.sf.net/sfu/velocityconf _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
