"proto" Alpha? - Anyone know what this thing is?

RXed this machine on the weekend. It appears to be an Alpha of some sort. Physically looks like a generic ATX PC clone, in a standard ATX case with powers supply - has PS/2 keyboard/mouse, two COM and 1 LPT ports. The board has two standard PCI slots, what appears to be two extended (64 bit?) PCI slots, and two ISA slots. Now the parts that don't look so much like a PC: - The memory consists of an array of 4 DIMMs, which although I haven't counted them, look like 168pin sockets. But the DIMMs are about three times the height of a normal DIMM, and do say "Digital" (as in DEC) on them. - Honkin big ceramic CPU - has studs in it for mounting the heatsink directly to the CPU chip. Under the heatsink is the following printed on the ceramic edge of the CPU: DEC 1026J H 9707 PROTO JD0855 (C) (M) DEC 1995 It was pretty well stripped when I got it - Had installed what looks like a generic S3 PCI video card (ie: looks like a PC card), and some sort of ISA multi-channel video capture card. The mainboard has 2 IDE and 1 floppy connectors although no such drives or cabling were in it - There was a SCSI CD in the enclosure, bit no SCSI controller (however several of the backplates were missing suggesting there might have been additional cards. The two cards that were in it were not actually fastened in - so they may or may not belong with it. Anyone know what this thing might be? Unfortunately it doesn't appear to do anything - No video, no beeps, no serial port activity, no toggeling of status lights on the keyboard - does power-up and down with the front panel button, but does nothing else. (It occurs to me that if the video card were not the correct one, the Alpha obviously would not know how to run the x86 BIOS on a PC card and it might either crash (if it tried to execute it), or get hung up because it doesn't have a video device it can talk to. (I haven't tried the video card in a PC, but I will at some point). It's probably a doorstop, but I wanted to check and see if anyone recognizes it --- the "PROTO" on the CPU seems interesting ... Could this be a prototype of some sort? Regards, Dave -- dave06a (at) Dave Dunfield dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com com Collector of vintage computing equipment: http://www.parse.com/~ddunfield/museum/index.html