[Info-vax] Vaxes shutting off this week

[Bill Gunshannon]

In article <009d403e$0$31688$c3e8da3 at news.astraweb.com>,
	JF Mezei <jfmezei.spamnot at vaxination.ca> writes:
> 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 had the inteligence to accept that there was room for
both RISC and CISC in the world.
> 
> 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.

Or just relied on advances in chip making technology to provide the
needed speedups over time.  Again, accepting that not all applications
require supercomputing speed or power.

> 
> 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.

The VAX already was.  It's demise was due much more to the growing notion
that RISC was the way of the future (much like we heard with EPIC around
the time Alpha was killed).

> 
> 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.

Highly unlikely.  Sun's customers wanted Unix.  If they actually wanted
VMS they would not have been Sun's customers.  Of course, they still 
could have been Dec's customers.  There was a perfectly acceptable
version of Unix for the VAX (actually, more than one.)

bill

-- 
Bill Gunshannon          |  de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n.  Three wolves
billg999 at cs.scranton.edu |  and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
University of Scranton   |
Scranton, Pennsylvania   |         #include <std.disclaimer.h>