[Info-vax] Vaxes shutting off this week

[JF Mezei]

Michael Moroney wrote:

> A big difference is that the PDP and the VAX ran their courses and were
> discontinued at an appropiate time.  Alpha was killed when it was pretty
> much the fastest processor. 


Upper management were convinced to sponsor multiple projects. One was
the 9000, the other was the Nvax, and there was the skunk work Alpha
project.

9000 tanked. The nVAX ended up succesful, but the Alpha team came up
with Alpha and then DEC stopped developping the VAX.


So, now, lets revion history (one of the few times we can do this)

The 8086 was considered dead-end, so Intel started what would be IA64.
IA64 turned out to be a dud that was over half a decade too late.
Meanwhile, Intel was forced to keep upgrading the 8086 because IA64
wasn't ready, and with the Alpha-inspiration, the pentium 3 turned out
to be really fast and once the barrier was broken, the 8086 achieved
incredible growth in performance, making the IA64 irrelevant since not
only had the prediced 8086 barrier been broken, but the 8086 was giving
extremely respectable performance.

Had Intel released Merced in 1995 and a not-laughable IA64 in 1996-1997,
it is possible that IA64 might have totally replaced the 8086 as the
industry standard chip. By the time it arrived, IA64 was useless since
the 8086 had already made IA64 a proprietary niche product.

VAX was never really allowed to break its barrier because Alpha came too
quickly to market.

With 25-JUN-2001 as end of architecture no matter what, it is likely
that VAX upgrades could have kept up with the Jones' until then.
However, Alpha had been meant to have a 25 year lifespan. And for such a
long life, it woudl be quite likely that VAX would have runned out of
steam well before and Alpha would have then sped past VAX
 for the remainder of the 25 years.


So, for a 25 year timeline, Alpha was the right choice beause it offered
 growth for the whole period. But for a 10 year history, it would have
been cheaper to just upgrade VAX until 25-JUN-2001 and forget about the
port to ALpha and the abandonment of so much software.