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

[Michael Kraemer]

JF Mezei schrieb:

> It wasn't so much the gift of the chip manufacturing that was the issue
> but rather the fine print at the end of the deal where Digital committed
> to porting Digital Unix (Tru64) to that then imaginary IA64 thing,

Sure. It doesn't require a lot of conspiracy theory
to guess what was negotiated behind the scenes.
Sell off Alpha to intel, who will manufacture it
as a stop-gap until Itanics arrive.

> but
> did not commit to porting VMS to it. It is ironic that under HP, the
> opposite happened.

well, collateral damage. HP found itself with two Unices
(three if one includes Linux) in the portfolio,
so the stepchild with least marketshare had to go.
This time it was an advantage that there is no other flavor of VMS.

> The theft of Alpha IP happened before Pentium 3 was released, years
> before.  DEC let it go unchallenged for years before finally using that
> card to get something from Intel (releive DEC of its chip business which
> Compaq didn't want).

Maybe the "theft" wasn't that evident.
IIRC it was never proven that intel "stole" anything.

> At that point, it wasn't so much Alpha but Digital. People noticed
> Palmer breaking up the company piece by piece.

1997 it was quite a bit late to recognize that.
Alpha was about the last part to sell before the rest
went to Compaq.

> From the time when Digital sold its chip manufacturing business, it was
> perfectly normal that Digital would outsource manufacturing of its own
> chips to the remaining manufacturers, whether Intel, IBM or any other.

If they had such a fabless Alpha strategy right from the start,
just as Sun and SGI had with their CPUs,
they might have fared much better economically.