Pipelining and Dec Jupiter thoughts....

[Zane Healy]

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.

Zane