[Info-vax] DEC/HP pricing, was: Re: Dave Cutler, Prism, DEC, Microsoft, etc.

[John Wallace]

On Nov 8, 12:15 pm, Simon Clubley <clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-
Earth.UFP> wrote:
> On 2009-11-07, Richard B. Gilbert <rgilber... at comcast.net> wrote:
>
>
>
> > It was never a mystery to me!  DEC was totally out of touch with the
> > market place.  The the RAM for the Rainbow that DEC sold for ~$700, I
> > bought at the Trenton Computer Festival for $30 US!  The 20 MB disk
> > drive that DEC sold for $2200, I bought for $300.  The 5-1/4" floppy
> > disks that DEC sold for $5 US each, I bought for $0.50 each and
> > formatted them myself in spite of the fact that my Rainbow "could not
> > properly format a floppy disk!"
>
> It's still going on.
>
> I currently have a quote on my desk for a Alpha server. The pricing
> for 512MB of memory is over 900 UKP (which is around 1500 USD at current
> exchange rates according to Google). (I don't have the exact price as I'm
> not at work at the moment).
>
> I don't expect commodity pricing in a server, but that's more than a bit
> excessive.
>
> Simon.
>
> --
> Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
> Microsoft: Bringing you 1980's technology to a 21st century world

I don't know what memory you're buying but the fact it's for an Alpha
(Server) means its a long way from current generation memory and
therefore whether it's for an AlphaServer or a similar era Proliant or
whatever, you get to pay a premium for legacy memory. You're also
almost certainly paying the premium for ECC memory. ECC memory is more
expensive than non-ECC, far more than you'd justify just by the extra
bits, whether it's for DEC or anybody else. And you're payint the
premium for someone holding stock long after the volume market has
moved on.

Find out what kind of memory it is, find an equivalent memory for a
Proliant and compare the prices. If you want cheaper and unwarranted,
buy the Proliant (at your own risk :)). If you want really cheap
desktop-style prices, you have to go non-ECC, and that probably just
doesn't work. In between, there are various shades of grey; not all
1GB DDR400 36bit DIMMs are equal, for example. If you want someone to
warrant that it's going to work, someone's going to have to carry the
risk. You can carry that risk yourself by buying cheap, or you can pay
to have someone worry about it for you.

A similar story used to apply with DEC vs non-DEC SCSI drives. I used
to have one particular system builder that bought assorted non-DEC
drives and then complained when odd storage-related things happened.
"Reproduce the problem with any drive listed on the SPD and we can
talk about it further". His problems never were reproducible. RAM's
simpler than SCSI (e.g. no firmware) but not all RAM of a given size
and technology is the same.

One last thing re RAM prices: the cheap RAM traditionally came from
people buying it on the spot market whereas DEC in general bought
their RAM on contract at committed prices (and in committed
quantities) many months ahead. This mean that DEC prices were often
late following the market down, but it also meant that in times of RAM
shortage, DEC had a chance of getting supplies, whereas the folks
relying on the spot market could advertise whatever prices they want,
it didn't matter because the spot market folks had no chance of
actually delivering anything, because the contracted RAM customers had
all the supplies. You may not have known this, it wasn't the only
reason why DEC prices were seen as OTT, but it was a factor in the RAM
prices.

I don't know if there was a spot market as well as a contract market
in SCSI storage but it wouldn't be a surprise if there was and if the
same price-related logic applied to storage as well as RAM.