Alpha's Going Going Gone

WildCode writes "Get your Alphas now cause HP is releasing the last of the Alphas (the final one expected to be released in 2004), and there will be no more." I was already under the mistaken impression that Alpha was dead, so this story is rather bittersweet for me. Still, as far as architectures go, Alpha will probably be among my favorites. It was once vastly ahead of its time, if not severely cost-prohibitive.

Comments

Good bye to more good stuff

[beldraen]

Having worked on Alphas (and VAXs for that matter) in my previous job for six years, I have to say good-bye to an old friend. It was, for me, an incredibly powerful platform that did so many data oriented tasks so easily. The multitasking performance was amazing. We, for the longest time, ran on a VAX that was the equivalent to about a 486-120 MHz machine that could handle thirty developers. At the same time, it could handle thirty clients running reports. In general, we didn't notice each other. The Alphas put that system to shame. I often had to remember that I was working with multi-gigbyte files and processing them in seconds, not hours like on a PC. But, I suspose we'll have to use the "future" of PC hardware until it eventually catches up to the past.. =)