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

[Richard B. Gilbert]

John Wallace wrote:
> 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."

DEC is gone!  Microsoft is still here.  That says it all!