My Computer Collection
DECstation 5000/200

Photo of DECstation 5000/200
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.

Processor:
Mips R3000, 25 MHz
Coprocessor:
Mips R3010, 25 MHz
Cache:
64 Kbytes Code, 64 Kbytes Data
Integer Performance:
25 VAX-Mips, roughly like a 486DX2/66
Memory:
48 Mbytes (options range from 8M to 480M)
Bus:
3 TurboChannel slots @ 25 MHz
Interfaces (onboard):
  • Mouse, Keyboard
  • 2 x Serial
  • SCSI (narrow)
  • 10 Mbps Ethernet (BNC only)
Add-on cards:
  • PMAGB-A Color Video (1024x864@256 colors)
  • PMAZ-AA SCSI Host adapter (narrow)
  • DEFZA optical FDDI interface
Operating System(s):
  • Ultrix 4.5
  • NetBSD 1.3.2


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©1998 Alfred Arnold, alfred@ccac.rwth-aachen.de