[ale] Alpha DEC

Sat Apr 5 20:21:50 EDT 2025

I have written about this several times, but here it goes again:

I joined DEC's Unix group in 1983.   The group was very small, mostly giving hardware support to companies using BSD Unix and AT&T's Unix on PDP-11s and VAX machines.   Of course if you had Unix on those machine in those days you had an AT&T source code license.   Unless you were a research university (and had a site-wide research license) this was very expensive and difficult to manage, because you had to supply AT&T your CPU serial number before you could put the code onto your system.

Sun Microsystems had negotiated a binary-only license which not only lowered the license price dramatically, but eliminated the need for the CPU serial number.   Companies like DEC, IBM, HP and others kind of "woke up" and decided that maybe this "Unix thing" was important, so they started to engineer and bring out their own versions of Unix systems (Ultrix for DEC, AIX for IBM, HP/UX for HP and of course a series of other Unix-like systems).

About 1986 an MIT student, who was used to getting the Unix systems in source code format was incensed about getting the latest copy only in binaries.   He wanted to be able to change the system to support the printers and other hardware he had, and he could not do that.   So he decided to write his own system, with all of the code available in source, and to make sure people were not confused about it he told them emphatically that "GNU is Not Unix!".   Of course this was Richard Stallman (RMS), and he later formulated the General Public License (GPL) and the Free Software Foundation to drive this forward.

Over time the GNU project developed compilers, libraries, utility programs, shells, etc that could "easily" be ported to various other operating systems and architectures, allowing programmers and users to move from one system to another without having to learn how to use that other system's tools and interfaces.   Oh yeah, Richard wrote some text editor too......

Fast-forward to late 1993.   Linus had started the Linux kernel in late 1991 and it was up to version 0.99xxx or so.   Some other people had taken the kernel as it was, the GNU code, the X Window System from MIT, some other code from BSD, and created "distributions" that would run on the Intel 32-bit CISC architecture.   Distributions such as Soft Landing Systems (SLS), Yggdrasil, Slackware and a fledgling Red Hat made their way out.

Sitting in my office at DEC I opened one of my favorite magazines, "Dr. Dobbs Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia (or Running Light without Overbyte" (yes, that WAS the title) and in the back of it was an advertisement for "A complete Unix operating system including all the binaries for 99 dollars"  Now I knew this was completely BONKERS because I had been in the Unix space since 1980 when I went to work for Bell Labs and I knew that Unix System Labs (USL) was in the process of suing the pants off a small company for selling the source code for Unix for 1000 dollars....

...but hey!  It was only 99 dollars!   So I sent away for it.

In the mail I received a CD and a small book that told me about how to install it.   The only problem was that I did not have one of those weak, miserable, crappy Intel PCs.   I worked for DEC and we sold REAL WORKSTATIONS.   VAX, MIPS, Alphas!

So all I could do was mount the CD on my DEC MIPS workstation running Ultrix and look at the man(1) pages.   I was impressed, but since I could not run it I put it back in my filing cabinet and forgot about it.
About January of 1994 a friend of mine, Kurt Reisler, who was the chair of the Unix Special Interest Group (UniSIG) of the Digital Equipment Corporation User's Group (DECUS) started sending emails to various companies asking for money and copying me on the emails. Apparently Kurt wanted SOME GUY from Europe to come to DECUS in New Orleans in May of 1994 to talk about his hardware project.

The companies kept writing back telling Kurt that they did not have much money, so could not fund this, but they would be happy to send him some CDs with code on them.

Eventually I went to my management and said "I do not know who this guy is nor what he did, but often Kurt has good ideas, so I think we should fund it." Then my management went to their management and said "We don't know who is guy is or what he did, and we do not even know who Kurt is, but sometimes maddog has good ideas, so we think we should fund it."

Soooooo we bought a round-trip airline ticket and rooms in a hotel in New Orleans for this person.
That was when Kurt asked the unforgivable. "I need you to rent me an IBM PC for the software".
“KURT", I said, "We DO NOT MAKE WEAK, CRAPPY MISERABLE Intel PCS! We make REAL computers!”

Of course I eventually gave in and when I flew down to DECUS there was Kurt trying to install this software on that weak, miserable, crappy Intel PC. And Kurt was failing.
Along came a nice young man with sandy brown hair, wire-rim classes, wearing wool socks and sandals, and with a lilting European accent said (in perfect English) "May I help you?" Kurt smiled and said "I think you can".

About ten minutes later Linux was working on that weak, miserable, crappy Intel PC.
Kurt and Linus (for that was who the young man was) invited me to sit down and use Linux.
By this time I had used every version of Unix on the face of the planet, but as I used Linux, if I thought of it as System V, it was System V. If I thought of it as BSD, it was BSD. It was smooth, fast and a joy to use.

Now during these months the DEC Alpha processor was shipping with OpenVMS and DEC Unix on it, but these were closed-source operating systems. I wanted an operating system on the DEC Alpha that OS researchers could do research on the best way of utilizing a 64-bit operating system.

Because on a 32-bit system you could probably map in about four billion (2^32) bytes. On a 64-bit system you could map in four billion TIMES four billion (2^64) or 1.844 x 10^19....enough to store 32K bytes for every square meter on the surface of the earth (including all the oceans).

I went to listen to Linus give his two talks at DECUS (attendance was 19,000 people) to an audience of 40 people at each talk, I thought to myself THIS is the operating system I need for the DEC Alpha.

So I took Linus out on the Natchez steamboat, the last paddlewheel steam-driven riverboat on the Mississippi and as we ate the buffet dinner and drank Hurricanes (a fruity drink with a dash of fruit and a lot of rum) I asked Linus "Have you ever thought of porting Linux to a 64-bit RISC system, like the DEC Alpha?"

He said "Yes, but the Helsinki office of DEC has been having a difficult time getting me a DEC Alpha, so I may have to do the IBM PowerPC instead."

I SCREAMED, and dropped my Hurricane (fortunately in a plastic glass). I NEVER drop a drink...EVER.

"Don't do anything RASH", I said to Linus.

And the next day I flew back to New England and facilitated getting Linus a DEC Alpha'
People will tell you that in a large company you write a proposal, send it to your manager, who reads it and sends it to their manager until finally it gets approval, and maybe a budget.

All of that is crap.  What you really do is pull in favors.   By that time I had been working for DEC eleven years and there were a LOT of people who owed me favors...BIG favors...and I was about to pull one in.

As Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper often said "It is easier to ask forgiveness than permission.

So I called a friend of mine and said "Jim, I need an Alpha system sent to Helsinki.  I do not have the time to tell you who it is for or what the software is, but I need it right away....TOMORROW, JIM!   And the next day a system worth 30,000 dollars (remember, 1994 dollars) was sent to Helsinki, Finland on nothing more than my request to a friend.

There is a lot more, but it is late and I am tired.

To paraphrase Jerry Garcia "What a Long Strange Trip It's Been". And I would not change a bit of it.

md

> On 04/05/2025 11:48 AM EDT Boris Borisov via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:
>  
>  
> Someone onhttp://hackaday.com mentioned your name as person that demonstrate 64 bit Linux on DEC Alpha CPU.
> Can you share little about that experience from the past?
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