Click here or click onto the photo for a full size version of this picture. The DECstation 5000/200 was the first machine of the DECstation series that had a bus for expansion cards. It is the DEC-proprietary TurboChannel bus that was used throughout the whole line of DECstations and the first generation of Alpha-based DEC workstations (namely the DEC 3000 line). Remarkable is the amount of memory you can stuff into a desktop machine that was built around 1990. The machine has 15(!) memory slots, each of which can hold a module of either 8 or 32 Mbytes. The memory area however consumes so much space in the machine that there is no space for internal drives, so a 5000/200 was almost always found together with one or more "Storage Expansion" boxes. In this picture, it is sitting between the machine and the monitor. A nice detail is the ECC checking of the RAM. Each memory word of 32 bits is accompanied with enough check bits to correct single-bit errors and to detect any two-bit error. |
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