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

[John Wallace]

On Nov 9, 11:00 am, Neil Rieck <n.ri... at sympatico.ca> wrote:
> On Nov 8, 6:08 pm, Michael Kraemer <M.Krae... at gsi.de> wrote:
> [...snip...]
>
>
>
>
>
> > 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.
>
> When you go back and read documents like this:
>
> http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/comphist/bell.htm#Transitio...
>
> ...you get the feeling that various groups of technical people were
> pulling DEC in various directions while management was not
> coordinating the activities of these very talented people. Statements
> like this:
>
> <quote>
> Then they (DEC management) killed the Prism project and Mr. Cutler
> left. They killed it, but Ken (Olsen) didn’t know that it wasn’t dead.
> It was still alive in the semiconductor group and it sprung up as
> Alpha.
> </quote>
>
> ...indicates to me that "either the semiconductor group was not
> notified that PRISM was dead" or "the semiconductor group ignored the
> order to stop working on it" or "the semiconductor group was so far
> along that DEC management told them to finish their current
> activities".
>
> Any one of these scenarios means that Alpha was as welcome as an
> unplanned birth (at least to some people). This is strange because DEC
> manufactured and sold way more Alpha-based equipment than VAX.
>
> NSR

With the greatest possible respect to the author, and even bearing in
mind the interview is in 1995 (a couple of years after NT first
emerged) what on earth is this quote about:
"Until Microsoft, I though DEC had the greatest engineering
organization, but Microsoft is substantially better."