Mine's still going strong
I've gotten a lot of mileage out of my DEC Personal Workstation. My first foray into 64-bit and non-x86 platforms, I learned about compiling/porting software that helped a lot later on. For a couple decades I'd roll my eyes at people fawning over incredible new case designs from Apple and others, as my PWS from the 90's had 3 zones, variable speed fans, and a motherboard that slid-out toolless with just two levers to pull.
I recently decided it was time to upgrade the old girl. The installed 256MB of RAM was unable to compile some software (on OpenBSD), and the only remaining Linux distro for Alpha (Gentoo) needs more RAM just to boot-up. Unfortunately I waited too long and 8-chip PC100 RAM has become rare enough that it wasn't dirt cheap, but it worked, and I should get good use out of my Alpha for many more years.
Other upgrades were more convenient.
All 80mm fans including the PSU fan were replaced with quieter new (also variable-speed) units
To ensure I'd be able to keep using the system in the event of a PSU failure, I tried powering it up with a stock ATX PSU. There's a special 6-pin connector in the original PSU, but the only bit needed was short the front two pins and the system boots and operates perfectly.
A spare 4-port USB 2.0 PCI card I was about to throw out worked perfectly in my Alpha, as well as did a USB Wi-Fi dongle, which is quite the strange thing to have on such a system. Unfortunately USB keyboards don't work in the SRM firmware, and a PS/2 keyboard must be plugged-in or the graphics is switched off and console switches over to the local console. Still good for mice and other peripherals.
I happened to find the thin (0.5") mini (no numpad) model of keyboard I prefer and use, had its chips originally designed in the transition days, so a PS2/USB converter plug commonly found on mice works nicely to make it work in the PS/2 port, and I've got several of them stockpiled as spares as they were quite cheap and each held up for more years than I expected.
Threw in a second NIC because again I had some PCI cards I would otherwise have thrown out.
Installed a PCI SATA controller as well. Got a 0.5TB drive running from the built-in IDE controller working fine, but was looking to ensure future compatibility. SRM won't boot off the SATA add-in card, but I can bootstrap from floppy, CD-ROM, network, or maybe a small IDE flash (CF?) drive then switch over to the SATA early in the boot process. Disk I/O really didn't improve, capped at 25MB/s probably due to the old 33MHz PCI bus. There are 64-bit PCI-X slots, but there was a hardware issue, so practically no cards are compatible.
Still got my QLogic SCSI card in there. The RaSCSI devices sound good, one SCSI device that serves as multiple virtual drives, Wi-Fi networking, and more, while being remotely reconfigurable is sure tempting, but it's all too ironic that the computer in the RaSCSI supporting it, is far more powerful than the one in the actual system. Reminds me of an IBM mainframe, which won't even boot-up without a Thinkpad Laptop "support element", an HMC computer, and even then, all storage is external as well...
Video is an old ATI r128 PCI card, rather than DEC's original TGA monster (which means no GUI with NetBSD). Lots of ATI cards worked on DEC Alpha, while none of the Nvidia PCI cards I tried would come up at all. Guess they just didn't care about openfirmware support.
Runs modern Linux / OpenBSD software just fine if you aren't in a great hurry... headless server with RS232 console, or hooked-up to a monitor via VGA which most still include. Connects up nicely over RS232 to my old QVT109 terminal I've been keeping as well. I don't have a big retro systems collection, just a few key devices that give a good idea of just how the computing world has evolved.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
