Digital Equipment Corportation 3000/M600

This is my Alpha. It was produced in 1994 and was a screamer for its time. It packs a 175MHz Alpha 21064 64-bit RISC processor. Not too bad for a time when PCs were overheating at 66MHz. This particular machine was rescued from the dumpster at Alcatel. It has 256 MB of RAM, a 2x CD-ROM, a 4GB internal drive, and aDEC Sound and Motion MPEG encoding board.

The photo below is what you see when you remove the cover; a big power supply, the three TurboChannel slots, the top of the CD-ROM, and the mezzanine tray with up to two disks.

Below, you can see how the machine looks internally, with the mezzanine tray containing the SCSI devices removed. Note the Ethernet board with AUI port in the center TurboChannel slot, and the Sound and Motion AV300 MPEG board at the far right. The memory SIMMs mount on riser cards above and below the CPU. The each riser has 4 slots, and each of the 4 slots on the motherboard for the riser to plug into is about 8 inches wide.

DEC abandoned TurboChannel in the early 90's to move to PCI. PCI is probably a wise marketing move, cheaper to develop, and faster, but TurboChannel (like SBUS) has more class and was plug-n-play before and better than PCI.


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