DEC AlphaPC 164SX

I bought this machine (just the motherboard to be precise) in February 2015 on eBay. It has a 533MHz Alpha CPU and came with 256MB of RAM originally but I have since upped this to 768MB. Originally I bought a Trio64 graphics card, DEC DE500-AA Ethernet card and Qlogic ISP1040B PCI SCSI Card for the machine and it has been in a total of three cases so far. Since the picture was taken it has had a Compaq IDE DVD-ROM drive fitted. In the past it has had a Sun 50pin SCSI DVD-ROM installed, but I moved this to an external SCSI enclosure to use on other systems.

In March 2017 I was fortunate enough to receive a PowerStorm 4D40T graphics card for this machine which was a big improvement over the Trio64 card with its 1280×1024 resolution with 24bit colour compared to the Trio64’s 1024×768 with 8bit colour. A sacrifice that came with using this PowerStorm card was that I had to remove the PCI sound card I had found for the machine since the PowerStorm card takes 2 PCI slots rather than one. This meant I lost my ability to run DECTalk under Digital UNIX, but at the time I wasn’t too bothered as I had got this running on my Personal Workstation as well.

Normally Linux on machines like this doesn’t interest me at all and I stick to the unique proprietary OSes where possible. RedHat Linux was officially supported by DEC/Compaq for Alpha machines though, which piqued my interest. This machine turned out to be the easiest for me to try it out on and so I swapped out the graphics card for the 256 colour TGA card (PowerStorm 3D30) that came in my Personal Workstation originally as had upgraded to an ELsa Gloria Synergy card (PowerStorm 3D10T) which could do 24bit colour on that machine. The graphical installer didn’t work with the TGA card but after installation with the text mode installer, things worked well. I also had to use the external SCSI enclosure I put the Sun DVD-ROM in as the IDE drive didn’t work for installation, but again worked fine afterwards. Swapping the graphics card meant I could put the sound card I had working under Digital UNIX back into the machine as well. This also worked fine under RedHat.

I have had this machine running both Windows NT for Alpha and Digital/Tru64 UNIX as well. However, this machine does not hold both the AlphaBIOS and SRM console in its flash ROM at once. This means that to switch between Windows and UNIX you need to reflash the ROM each time. A way to get around this I used was to set the dipswitch on the motherboard to start in emergency boot mode. What this does is force the machine to load its BIOS from a floppy disk every time it powers up. I did this until I got the Personal Workstation, after which I permanently flashed the SRM console and installed Windows on the Personal Workstation instead as it can start AlphaBIOS from the SRM Console by typing “arc” at the prompt since it stores both the AlphaBIOS and SRM Console in its ROM.

Currently the machine has two hard drives, an 18GB drive with Digital UNIX 4.0E installed and a 9GB drive with RedHat Linux 7.2 for Alpha installed.