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

[Michael Kraemer]

Neil Rieck schrieb:

> <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".

How can an activity as expensive as CPU development
(to the tune of several $100M per year, if it's serious development)
go undetected under the radar?
I mean, cut off funding and project is dead.
Or did Cutler&Co find ways of "stealth funding" of the order
of $100M per year? Now, *that* would have been ingenious, more than
Alpha itself.

> Any one of these scenarios means that Alpha was as welcome as an
> unplanned birth (at least to some people). 

It seems to me that going MIPS,
though technically, economically and "politically"
sensible (as Mr. Bell himself has stated),
did not please the egos of some of DECs techies.
So Alpha was started, but it came so late
and was so overambitious
that it contributed to the demise of the company.

> This is strange because DEC
> manufactured and sold way more Alpha-based equipment than VAX.

Really? HP website says 1Mio alpha chips were sold during
alpha's existance (1992-2006). Many of them went into
multi-CPU boxes, i.e. the number of equipment would be lower,
in the several hundred thousands.
What I hear is OTOH that by the time alpha was introduced,
more than half a million VAXen had been sold, and some more
would have followed until their discontinuance.
That's not "way" more alphas than VAXen, it seems to me.