AlphaStation 200/250 and 255 - ebay observations

Dan Snyder wrote: We used the 133mhz, 233mhz, and 500 (or so) mhz boards for servers at our company, and an OEM motherboard. There were memory modules on the cpu board that had a sad history with us. I was told that someone tried to use an off brand early on, which was blamed by DEC (or the reseller we bought the boxes from) for failures in the field. All of them (10 or so systems) had the off brand pulled and DEC put in. Problems vanished. I relate this as we took over the company in 2000 after everyone was fired, and this had happened sometime in the early to mid 90's. I could look at my notes, and someone here would call me on it, as I don't recall when the servers were put out. The company had only bought the motherboards, and cpu's and had built up the enclosures, power, etc. They added a couple or three DEC nic's and a scsi controller, but hooked up via serial port to boot the system, no display card. I suspect that a lot of these systems will turn up without memory because the real value in an old system is for the memory. Or if a "gold scrapper" or some other rocket scientist gets hold it, they strip the memory just because they think it is valuable. Sadly the memory is rare according to the fellow who still has to handle the bit of support that the company still does, but we have lots of tradeins to pull our memory from now, as everyone has migrated to Linux. BTW they used Dec Unix for some reason, I think because they could get the bare system boards cheap, and build a "redundant backup power" system, and try to save money. It was useful to the marketing types to build a system, rather than integrating a system, which was also a motive. AIX would have fit most users early on, and thru the period that systems were shipped with these Alphas, or even HP/UX, as almost no one used Dec Unix. One big bank was the only ones who used it, and that was only after the fact. They werent the reason that the Alpha was used. Jim