Looking to give away *old* linux PCs

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Yanni Chiu <yanni-bJEeYj9oJeDQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org>

| And you don't want the Alpha. If it's a DEC Alpha, wouldn't that be a museum
| piece.

Yeah.

Dave loaned me a Multia some years ago.  I found it quite difficult to
get running under Linux.  I ended up passing it on to Lennart.

Drew also had one.

The Alpha-based Multias were actually quite slow, at least if you
didn't have the optional memory cache.  They had required notebook
hard drives, and even then, not all fit.  They had firmware that
supported NT and not Unix, or vice versa (I don't remember).  Linux
seemed to require the firmware for NT, if I remember correctly.  The
ARC firmware for the Multia had a severe bug that would cause it to go
into an infinite loop if some (emulated) instruction was executed.

Summary: although the Alpha chip had a great architecture, DEC did a
number of things to kneecap it, especially in the Multia.
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