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

[Richard B. Gilbert]

FredK wrote:
> 
> "JF Mezei" <jfmezei.spamnot at vaxination.ca> wrote in message 
> news:010541fb$0$23355$c3e8da3 at news.astraweb.com...
>> Neil Rieck wrote:
>>> was tantamount to admitting a mistake. "Driving asway Culter was one
>>> of the dumbest f*ck*ng things Digital ever did", on person said. "But
>>> we can't say we screwed up because some of the idiots responsible for
>>> that are still here".
>>
>>
>> My impression is that people are putting way too much importance on
>> Cutler, perhaps because they hear about Cutler bragging about himself.
>>
> 
> I find it amusing to hear the opinions of people who've never met Dave 
> or any of the original team that built VMS.
> 
> "Driving away Cutler..." was all part of a common problem, the OpenVMS 
> group had reached the 800lb Gorilla mark and had veto power over a lot 
> of things. It also was the ATM machine.  So there was an unwillingness 
> and inability to implement whatever would replace VMS.  Dave leaving was 
> just one of the symptoms, a very large example of it.
> 
>> Digital went to NT because  at first it wanted Alpha to become widely
>> used, and not much later, because it wanted to abandon its own operating
>> systems to become a Microsoft reseller.
>>
> 
> DEC wanted to be able to make money or at least break even building 
> Alpha chips.  Period.  Windows was the potential jackpot in terms of 
> volume.
> 
>> A Cutler-less team managed to build a most excellent Alpha chip
>> architecture. And it made more sense to port VMS than starting yet
>> another operating system since VMS has an installed base and still had
>> an impressive software portfolio.
>>
> 
> Gads.  Take this as a lesson: had they been able to produce nVAX on 
> time, there wouldn't have been a need for Alpha.  

That's highly questionable.  It was already known that a RISC 
architecture plus an optimizing compiler could blow the doors off a CISC 
system.

Did anyone here ever try to run DECWindows on a VAXStation 2000?  The 
Alpha Station 200 does it without even breathing hard.  Both machines 
might be properly described as the slowest machines in their respective 
architectures.

> From the blank-slate 
> perspective, Alpha is great.  BUT it was a DISASTER for VMS regardless 
> of the performance.  It broke binary compatibility, shedding ISV's and 
> products that were never ported.  It caused calendar *years* of effort 
> and millions and millions of dollars to do.  It was ported to VMS 
> because at the time, VMS was still big business - but by then internally 
> VMS was seen as a strategic dead end (at the time it was UNIX as the 
> next big thing) and the UNIX/RISC weed had rooted.  VMS never recovered 
> from the VAX running out of gas, and the port to Alpha.  But it was 
> inevitable that it had to happen, and we (DEC) needed to have been 
> planning what came *after* VMS.
> 

Are there *any* CISC systems being manufactured today?  Even the 80x86 
family is RISC at the core; the CISC instruction set is layered on top 
of a RISC processor.