On May 7, 2021, at 12:53 PM, Cameron Kaiser via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
Back in the mid-90s, there was an outfit in
Britain which made some
laptops using Alpha processors.
That was the Tadpole ALPHAbook. Not many of those got to the outside world.
Been watching for one for over a decade. For a period of time it was the
fastest laptop available and it was reportedly not overly unpleasant to use
(my Tadpole Viper, on the other hand, *is* unpleasant to use).
There was a rumor inside DECin the same
time-frame about DEC engineers
prototyping an Alpha-based laptop (which never made it to market).
The rumor included the internal code-name... "BURNS".
I don't doubt it!
I?ve had my eye?s out for one for more like 20+ years. I do have a Tadpole SparcBook 3GS
(? something like that), that was a pretty cool system.
These if I needed OpenVMS on a laptop, I?d simply run it via emulator or virtualization
(not an option for Itanium). I gather that at least some development on OpenVMS 9.2 is
being done on VM?s running on the developers laptops.
I seem to recall that the Tadpole AlphaBook performance is roughly on par with the DEC
Multia, which is to say, not very good. Though I don?t think I ever got OpenVMS running
on my Multia.
I have an ALPHAbook. You're right, it's about the speed of the Multia.
The batteries I have are dead, but when they were still working the
run time wasn't very long.
--
Eric Dittman