notANON

DEC Alpha CPU from the early 1990's

I was googling my own name today and found something interesting a few pages into the serp.  It was a little reminder that old data never dies.  In 1998 my second job in tech was building DEC(Digital Equipment Corporation) Alpha clones.  We could build the clones for FAR less than DEC sold them for and DEC still made money since they sold us the motherboards with a CPU for $5,000.

In those days, I used to come up with creative ways to burn the systems in.  I was installing Windows NT(alpha), DEC Unix & Redhat Linux.  None of these were binary compatible with anything x386.  These were 600Mhz, 64-bit risc architecture machines at a time where a Pentium Pro 150Mhz was a FAST desktop machine.  Since I didn’t have a proper burn-in suite, I would use distributed applications to crunch tons of data in hopes of at least running the processor through it’s paces a bit even if not the hard drive and other components.  Seti was among my favorites but sometimes I “donated” cycles to some other projects.  The Certicom ECC cracking challenge was one such project.  At the time, I didn’t really realize the significance of what I was doing.  If you look at the lists of people, there were only 40-80(or so) people who donated cpu cycles to each of these challenges.

I was just a young guy looking for precompiled binaries to test the somewhat rare systems I was building since I didn’t know how to compile code on those systems at the time.  Little did I know my name would be immortalized on the web as part of this project wielding some of the fastest single processor computers of the era. Check out the page here.  It’s really kind of fun to read about how one of the people running the project was crunching data packets on his ARM2 8Mhz machines.