Ahh.. the eternal debate "What is vintage?". I don't have an answer. I can tell you, entirely for practical reasons, VCF MA has decided the cut off date for artifact acquisitions is 1995. This doesn't mean they don't take anything after 1995, just that the default for later than 1995 is no. It also doesn't mean anything before 1995 is "vintage" and anything after is "not vintage". There is just literally only so much space for storage and prioritizing older artifacts as a default does seem both practical and prudent. So, at least under that definition, VCF MA would gladly accept a donation of an Alpha (I think they may have one... but the more the merrier!) since it was introduced in November 1992. Ultimately, each person has to decide what is or is not vintage for themselves and debating our individual decisions might be fun, but will never lead to OneTrueAnswer<tm>. I'll also use this opportunity to address any concerns that I am disparaging the Alpha. I still remember my computer architecture professor in 1993 telling us that Intel only had a few years left before RISC was going to win the processor wars. My university had labs of SparcStations and Indigos (1s, at that) to prove it. I had especially high hopes that the Alpha was going to become the processor of the future. Of course, as we all know, Intel out RISC'd the RISC machines and even had to be reminded (Itanium... booooo!) by AMD that backwards compatibility (x86-64) is king. Just imagine if DEC had added dynamic binary translation (or some other technology) to run x86 binaries on Windows NT for Alpha. I can complain forever about Apple, but they always understood the need for backwards compatibility. 680x0 -> PowerPC, PowerPC -> x86, x86 -> ARM. And, for reasons that will be obvious to some people, it is so much easier to have a RISC chip run CISC than the other way around, so DEC probably could have done it or at the very least done a better job evangelizing companies to compile directly to Alpha. So Alpha wasn't a failure as a product, but it also didn't set the world on fire like I think it could have. It has also become somewhat of a footnote in history much like my favorite processor ever, Sparc. Sadly, I teach MIPS assembly these days, even though my heart will always be with Sparc, because it is close enough and much more practical in terms of platform independent simulators. And, to head off the obvious question, I teach MIPS after 6502 assembly to my computer architecture and high school students because starting assembly with x86 is JustCruel<tm>. Best wishes, -Adam On Sat, Jan 29, 2022 at 10:30 AM Brian Schenkenberger via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
Jameel Akari via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> writes:
On Jan 28, 2022, at 4:41 PM, Adam Michlin via vcf-midatlantic = <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote: >=20 >=20 > Dean Notarnicola was nice enough to scan it and Javier Rivera cleaned > it up for reprinting. Neither Dean, myself, or I (or VCF) receives any > money from the sale and yeah, we know DEC (now owned, I believe, by > HP) might copyright strike us so get it while you can. >=20 > https://www.8bittees.com/product/alpha-two-sided-tee/
Just ordered one. Thanks for making this possible. Now I know what to exhibit and what to wear. :)
Are Alpha now *vintage*?