The first official VAX clone – well Alpha AXP really – has arrived on the market with the launch by Wheat Ridge, Colorado-based Aspen Systems Inc, which has licensed OpenVMS from Digital Equipment Corp and is offering it pre-loaded on its Alpine workstations, which are built around an Alpha 21066, 21064 or 21064A processor and the 21072 Peripheral Component Interconnect core logic chip set with a 128-bit memory bus designed for maximum computing performance. The company has designed a pop out chip and oscillator arrangement so that the same Alpine motherboard supports processors at 166MHz, 200MHz, 233MHz and 275MHz. The board includes three PCI slots at up to 132M-bytes per second and three AT slots. The company has been shipping the workstations since April for Windows NT and NT Advanced Server, and offers as board-level OEM products and as complete systems. The company gave no prices.
