[Info-vax] Out with Hurd, in with OpenVMS

[Michael Kraemer]

John Wallace schrieb:
> On Aug 21, 10:43 am, Michael Kraemer <M.Krae... at gsi.de> wrote:
> 

>>
>>But you couldn't have produced a $1000 machine with the fastest
>>Alpha in it without making a loss, because this CPU alone
>>costs $2000 to make.
> 
> 
> A) $2000 to for who to make *what*, please?

The proverbial $1000 alpha inside PC for the mass market.

> B) Who says $2000?

rough estimate.
http://alasir.com/articles/alpha_history/dec_collapse.html
says that in 1995 EV5's costed $2000 to $3000,
with $500 being the pure manufacturing costs.
Whether the latter figure includes development costs
I don't know, probably not.
I have always heard about chip development costs being
$100M to $200M per year. Assume three year development
and subsequent three years on the market until
the chip becomes obsolete.
With a volume as low as the Alpha,
at max 100000 units shipped per year
( http://h18002.www1.hp.com/alphaserver/
mentions 1M chips in 15 years, 60000 per year on average ),
this means each chip would cost at least $1000 to $2000
just to recoup the development costs. And the actual
manufacturing costs would be added on top.

But even if the $500 figure is more correct than
my estimate, it would be too costly
to make a $1000 PC with a half decent margin.

> C) It's the *system* cost that counts, not just the chip cost.

yes, but if already the CPU is that expensive ...

> Earlier, Michael wrote "even in 1990 nobody would have bought a 150Meg
> diskanymore, the standard was 660 or even 990. "
> 
> I don't remember it quite like that. I bought my first PC three years
> after that, in 1993 when Gateway 2000 opened up the European market
> for sensibly priced PCs in cow-logo'd boxes. I wanted a PC to play NT
> 3.x on. What I got was a 486/33 with 12MB and a ~400MB IDE drive.
> 1993, not 1990, and 400MB not 660. Getting the next bigger drive above
> 420MB required a BIOS update and/or some weird disk address
> translation software. In 1993.

Well, the Amiga 3000 (of 1990 vintage) I bought in 1992
had a 100MB disk, which soon turned out to be too small even
for home use.
At about the same time frame at work the minimum workstation disk
was some 300 to 500 MB for DEC as well as IBM gear,
and for pure user data 990MB was hardly enough.