One of my customers has taken all of their AlphaServers out of use and since I just adore these servers I asked if I could have them. To my delight they agreed. Today me and my fiancé together with a good friend and co-worker went to my office and our data center to bring them home. Now I have a piece of computer history at home, what I got my hand on is following:

• 1x Digital AlphaServer 4100
• 2x Compaq AlphaServer ES40
• 1x Compaq AlphaServer ES20
• 3x Digital DSBA356-RD
• 1x Digital Something RAID Array

Digital Equipment Corporation was sold to Compaq on January 26, 1998 and later Compaq was bought by HP. During this whole time the Aplha processor architecture was developed and manufactured until April 27, 2007 when the most recent AlphaServers reached their end of general availability. At this time HP had developed the Itanium processor together with Intel to succeed the Alpha processor. However the AlphaServers are still supported by HP until sometimes during 2012, but according to HP the end of support might be delayed.

Even though AlphaServers has it’s own processor architecture the AlphaServer run various operating systems. It will run a bunch of UNIX based systems, first of all it’s designated Tru64 UNIX but also Linux and BSD. It also run OpenVMS – a mainframe-oriented operating system which despite it’s name is not an open source software product. To much surprise some of the AlphaServer models also run a version of Microsoft Windows NT specially ported to the Alpha processor architecture by DEC.

My gallery is nowhere close to finished, but you could see some pictures at: http://www.linuxchick.se/gallery/saving-a-piece-of-history/

This historial day Unix time turned 1234567890 at Sat Feb 14 00:31:30 CET 2009. Unix time or POSIX time counts the number of seconds elapsed since midnight January 1, 1970 UTC. Unix time does not count leap seconds.

[root@fortran ~]# date +%s
1234567890

Last major celebration for Unix time was Sun Sep 9 03:46:40 CET 2001 when it turned 1000000000.