[Info-vax] Dave Cutler, Prism, DEC, Microsoft, etc.

[Michael Kraemer]

Neil Rieck schrieb:

> 
> Not wanting to split hairs here, but I was in attendance at the Alpha
> 21064 announcement in Toronto, and it was at an industry trade show
> Feb-1992. All the handouts were cheap photocopies and most people
> wondered if this announcement was for real. I was a real a-hole in
> those days (more so than now, anyway) and so jokingly asked if DEC had
> any free chip samples. This caused the DEC rep to reach into his
> briefcase to hand me a bag of potato chips with a taped-on label of
> the space shuttle with the moniker "Alpha Chips". I still have the
> unopened bag of chips on top of my book case.

So who was the a-hole then? :-)

> Anyway, the 21064 appeared later that September and Palmer took over
> in October. Speaking of a-holes, Palmer was employed by DEC since 1985
> so he must have known something of Alpha. 

Sure, he was a semiconductor guy, iirc.
Of course pre-Palmer DEC did not want to get rid
of alpha, it was barely on the market then
(that's what I wanted to say).
One can't even say that Palmer-DEC wanted to get rid
of it in the early years, only later, when it turned
out to be an economic failure.

> The way he decided to sell
> off pieces of DEC (like RDB) makes me think he was just a hatchet man.

well, DEC was in such deep sh*t, maybe such a guy was needed?

> No company could have survived that many cuts in so short a time
> without bleeding to death.

Without selling parts of DEC, the company may have been
finished even earlier.