Digital personal workstation 500au

[Rory]

I recently got my Alphastation PWS 500au from my parents attic. I bought it in 2006 for $100 at the MIT swap fest. It has a 500mhz Alpha 21164 processor with like 512 megs of ram. I plan on testing it this weekend and want to try to install OpenVMS on it. I got it from the OpenVMS hobbyist program back in like 2006. It has been a long time since I tried to install it, but it had failed to install OpenVMS on it last time. The UNIX firmware works, and it does start installing it, but along the way it fails. I have a SCSI cdrom drives, SCSI hard drive, and using the onboard SCSI controller along with a matrox video card. Do I need a special video card to run OpenVMS? I had no issues with running windows nt4.0 on it, so the hardware does work. OpenVMS is kind of a quest of mine, so True64 really doesn’t cut it.

 

[reinhardtjh]

I'm fairly certain the Matrox card will not with OpenVMS. There are a very limited number of video cards that will work. Most are 15-20 years old. The most recent known working are a certain PCI version of the Radeon 7500 and 7000. You have to watch out because generally only true ATI cards work, the generic ones produced by others have firmware that's not quite right. And, I just realized, they require the Alpha EV6 generation which the 21164 is not, it's EV5.

Other known working video cards for an EV5 Alpha are:

Elsa GLoria 8MB
PowerStorm 4D10T
Powerstorm 4D20

I know the ELSA Gloria does as I had a PWS with one. It's a basic card and is slow, but it works. The PowerStorm series are more high powered but harder to find. There is some hinting by Google search that the S3Trio cards work too. I vaguely remember that. The ELSA is faster then those, I believe. But again, something that works is a plus at this point.

Posting the error messages when the install failed would be very helpful in determining why it did so.

Then there is the whole can of worms regarding the license PAKs. If you got the install disk from the OpenVMS Hobbyist program in 2006 then it has to be the HP version of OpenVMS. There are currently no legal hobbyist PAKS available for it. VMSSoftware has the Community License Program but only for it's version of OpenVMS starting with V8.4-2L1 for Alpha (which is what you would want as the newer V8.4-2L2 is only for EV6 and newer Alpha generations).

If you have old, legal Compaq or HP PAKS for an Alpha OpenVMS system, then they are marginally legal to use. Technically, if the PAKs came from another system/site, then you are supposed to pay HP a transfer fee for each license. Odds are that HP is not going to hunt you down if you dont, but it's the true, legal way.

If you have no PAKs for your OpenVMS install disk then the easiest thing to do is apply at the VSI CLP page and get theirs. They will supply you with PAKs for pretty much all OpenVMS software they have and an FTP site to download disk images and ZIP files with the installers.

 

[Rory]

I'm fairly certain the Matrox card will not with OpenVMS. There are a very limited number of video cards that will work. Most are 15-20 years old. The most recent known working are a certain PCI version of the Radeon 7500 and 7000. You have to watch out because generally only true ATI cards work, the generic ones produced by others have firmware that's not quite right. And, I just realized, they require the Alpha EV6 generation which the 21164 is not, it's EV5.

Other known working video cards for an EV5 Alpha are:

Elsa GLoria 8MB
PowerStorm 4D10T
Powerstorm 4D20

I know the ELSA Gloria does as I had a PWS with one. It's a basic card and is slow, but it works. The PowerStorm series are more high powered but harder to find. There is some hinting by Google search that the S3Trio cards work too. I vaguely remember that. The ELSA is faster then those, I believe. But again, something that works is a plus at this point.

Posting the error messages when the install failed would be very helpful in determining why it did so.

Then there is the whole can of worms regarding the license PAKs. If you got the install disk from the OpenVMS Hobbyist program in 2006 then it has to be the HP version of OpenVMS. There are currently no legal hobbyist PAKS available for it. VMSSoftware has the Community License Program but only for it's version of OpenVMS starting with V8.4-2L1 for Alpha (which is what you would want as the newer V8.4-2L2 is only for EV6 and newer Alpha generations).

If you have old, legal Compaq or HP PAKS for an Alpha OpenVMS system, then they are marginally legal to use. Technically, if the PAKs came from another system/site, then you are supposed to pay HP a transfer fee for each license. Odds are that HP is not going to hunt you down if you dont, but it's the true, legal way.

If you have no PAKs for your OpenVMS install disk then the easiest thing to do is apply at the VSI CLP page and get theirs. They will supply you with PAKs for pretty much all OpenVMS software they have and an FTP site to download disk images and ZIP files with the installers.

I'm fairly certain the Matrox card will not with OpenVMS. There are a very limited number of video cards that will work. Most are 15-20 years old. The most recent known working are a certain PCI version of the Radeon 7500 and 7000. You have to watch out because generally only true ATI cards work, the generic ones produced by others have firmware that's not quite right. And, I just realized, they require the Alpha EV6 generation which the 21164 is not, it's EV5.

Other known working video cards for an EV5 Alpha are:

Elsa GLoria 8MB
PowerStorm 4D10T
Powerstorm 4D20

I know the ELSA Gloria does as I had a PWS with one. It's a basic card and is slow, but it works. The PowerStorm series are more high powered but harder to find. There is some hinting by Google search that the S3Trio cards work too. I vaguely remember that. The ELSA is faster then those, I believe. But again, something that works is a plus at this point.

Posting the error messages when the install failed would be very helpful in determining why it did so.

Then there is the whole can of worms regarding the license PAKs. If you got the install disk from the OpenVMS Hobbyist program in 2006 then it has to be the HP version of OpenVMS. There are currently no legal hobbyist PAKS available for it. VMSSoftware has the Community License Program but only for it's version of OpenVMS starting with V8.4-2L1 for Alpha (which is what you would want as the newer V8.4-2L2 is only for EV6 and newer Alpha generations).

If you have old, legal Compaq or HP PAKS for an Alpha OpenVMS system, then they are marginally legal to use. Technically, if the PAKs came from another system/site, then you are supposed to pay HP a transfer fee for each license. Odds are that HP is not going to hunt you down if you dont, but it's the true, legal way.

If you have no PAKs for your OpenVMS install disk then the easiest thing to do is apply at the VSI CLP page and get theirs. They will supply you with PAKs for pretty much all OpenVMS software they have and an FTP site to download disk images and ZIP files with the installers.

Well, performance really isn’t that important. I have this tendency to repair a machine and get the operating system running, and then move on to another project one of these days I am going to sit down and play with the software instead of just tinkering with the hardware.

 

[DEChobbyist]

There are some details which could hinder the OpenVMS installation on a PWS 500au. Could be easier to assist if knowing what happens when you try to install OpenVMS.
The graphics adapter is not necessary for the installation. It can be done completely using the serial console (COM1 port).