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

[Doc Shipley]

Patrick Finnegan wrote:
> They've got an x86 emulator in the BIOS, so you can use a PC PCI video 
> card, have on-board IDE and floppy interfaces (the IDE is really slow).  
> They can netboot from either Tulip-chipset cards, or Intel eepro 100 
> nics (if you have a new enough firmware).  They can also boot off an 
> NCR/SYM53C875 chipset or Adaptec AHA2940 SCSI card (those are the only 
> ones I've tried).

   With the appropriate video card (and there are several PC video cards 
that work) and a Qlogic ISP1040 it'll also run VMS.

   Patrick put it mildly - there are no words for the performance of the 
CMD640 IDE chipset.  You *really* want fast SCSI to make it sing.

   Other than the IDE, it's a sweet board.

> It should also be able to do a serial console - try hooking something up 
> to the first serial port (9600-8-n-1), and see if you get a response.

   You can set the console from SMS/ARCBIOS, but IIRC if there's no 
keyboard plugged in it'll come up to serial console automagically.


	Doc