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

[FredK]

"Neil Rieck" <n.rieck at sympatico.ca> wrote in message 
news:72aec01f-1759-4b80-aaa3-1706389f3846 at d10g2000yqh.googlegroups.com...

>Let's also remember that DEC/Compaq sold more Alphas than
>VAX.Apparently Intel has sold more Itaniums than VAX + Alpha combined
>so the world didn't exactly fall to pieces with the end of VAX.

And Intel has sold more x86 based chips than all of them combined.  My 
simple point here is that from the point that VAX became uncompetetive at 
any price, to the point that nVAX showed up or Alpha showed up - was the 
breaking point - the knee in the curve.  We can argue about RISC vs CISC and 
the VAX instruction set until we turn blue.  We can rave about the 
performance of Alpha.  It didn't matter.  It was a day late and a dollar 
short.

Technical dweebs such as most of us are are too focused on the technical 
aspects and forget about the business aspects.  While the VAX became 
uncompetetive at any price, software companies ported code to other 
architectures like SPARC.  Alpha VMS required a port of the code, 
qualification and a new release.  So do you backport from UNIX to VMS? 
Upgrade the VAX code?  Support multiple code streams?  During that long span 
of bad VAX performance internally DEC had changed focus from VMS to UNIX and 
Windows.  As had many, many 3rd parties.

At that point in time, there were as many people on boards like this loudly 
upset with the demise of VAX as were happy with the birth of Alpha.