The BSD on Alpha HOW-NOT-TO
New hardware, new operating system. I'd managed to get hold of a DEC Personal Workstation 433a, which housed a 433 MHz Alpha processor and decided that this was an ideal machine to test out the various flavours of BSD.
Both FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD support the Alpha chip in a variety of hardware configurations so I figured this would be a good learning opportunity.
The machine in question hails from the time when DEC were in a very tenous partnership with Microsoft and DEC produced 2 variants of the Personal Workstation (aka the PWS or the Miata). Each PWS was named according to the speed of the Alpha chip it contained and whether it was targeted at running Microsoft's 64-bit port of Windows NT on Alpha, or running DEC's own OpenVMS and Tru64 UNIX operating systems.
For example, the PWS 500au was a 500 MHz box designed for OpenVMS and Tru64, whilst the PWS 433a was a 433 MHz box destined for Windows NT.
One important thing to remember is that the PWS is most definately not a PC, however the external look may decieve you.
