[Info-vax] Vaxes shutting off this week

[JF Mezei]

Glen Herrmannsfeldt wrote:

> With VAX and address mode bytes it is horribly complicated
> to decode instruction boundaries.  VAX works well for a
> microprogrammed serial instruction processor, reading bytes
> and operating on them.


The could have decided to do what they did to the 8086. Have a front end
decoder that generates RISC instructions from the complex CISC instructions.

Or, they could have focused on making the simple instructions very fast
and the remainder addressijg modes less optimised and then ask compiler
writers t generate code that uses the fast instructions.

If Intel was able to make the 8086 toy controller into a very
respectable chip, then Shirley Digital could have done the same with VAX.

Unfortunatly, at the time the decision was made to dump VAX in favour of
Alpha, they did not have the advantage of hindsight and
didn'T know that Intel would succeed in getting the 8086 to break so
many barriers.

And lets not forget that at the time, there was Sun breathing down
Digital's neck with its own risc chips with Sun/Apolllo systes getting
better price performance than VAX. (that was a marketing issue with
prices for DEC gear still priced too high)

Had DEC lowered prices of VAX sufficiently, it could have competed
against Sun, especially since VMS clustering did allow distributed
ocmputing amongst many nodes.