Pipelining and Dec Jupiter thoughts....

[Eric Dittman]

On 5/7/21 5:07 PM, Zane Healy via cctalk wrote:
> 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