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

[Michael Kraemer]

JF Mezei schrieb:
> Michael Kraemer wrote:
> 
> 
>>says that in 1995 EV5's costed $2000 to $3000,
>>with $500 being the pure manufacturing costs.
> 
> 
> This is where leadership comes in.  Hudson had been built for large
> volume. Palmer wanted to reserve capacity in case Alpha became high volume.

He/they tried at least three times to enter the high volume market,
in the very beginning with the PCish alpha's,
around 1995/96 with the Alpha PC (sp.?) and somewhere inbetween
with he AXPvme stuff. None of that panned out.
But for a consistent strategy one *had* to reserve
fab capacities. Just imagine the noise if it had turned
out the other way: Alpha boxes in high demand but cannot
be delivered due to CPUs in short supply.

> You build low cost machines, you can increase your volume. The cost per
> chip drops closer to the actual manufacturing cost.
> 
> 
> Nobody is saying that Digital could price Alpha PCs the same or lower
> then 8086s. But they could have been in the same ballpark, 

They tried to sell the second round of Alpha PCs
via a large PC reseller over here. Of course the
price was necessarily way higher than for a normal PC,
but they had it on the display, and also on the usual flyers, iirc.
Nobody wanted to buy.

> and that MUST
> include the cost of VMS and basic licenses for layered products
> (decwrite, deccalc etc which back in early 1990s were still very much
> current).

Mass market via VMS is just wishful thinking.
I can't imagine typical PC customer falling in love
with directories in square brackets.