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

[Bob Koehler]

In article <hehpmh$okf$1 at usenet01.boi.hp.com>, "FredK" <fred.nospam at dec.com> writes:
> 
> "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.

   Replacing VMS was not what DEC needed to do.  Porting to to faster,
   cheaper chips was needed.  DEC made a huge mistake not following
   through on Emerald.

   Nothing like having software as your 800lb gorilla and insisting on
   acting like a hardware company.  The response to Emerald clearly
   showed that they were not ready to get in bed with Intel, even though
   other folks at DEC clearly thought they needed to be an Intel PC
   vendor.

> 
> Gads.  Take this as a lesson: had they been able to produce nVAX on time, 
> there wouldn't have been a need for Alpha.  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.

   They responded to customer's insistence that speed was the driving
   factor, more important than binary compatability.  Maybe DEC was
   listening to the wrong customers.

   Looking at other vendors' successes in moving from 68K to various
   RISC, binary compatability isn't always such a big factor.  Even
   when DEC customers moved from PDP-11 to VAX-11, the only big user
   of compatability mode I ever saw was early releases of VMS itself.
 
> From the parochial viewpoint of the VMS installed base - what they needed 
> was faster VAXes.  Not Alpha.

   Faster and cheaper.  We noticed that a $1M+ (US) DEC 9000 had
   performance on par with a $30K RISC UNIX workstation.  Didn't matter
   whether it was running VMS or OSF-1 (UNIX).