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

[Michael Kraemer]

Bill Gunshannon schrieb:
> In article <i4qeso$ebq$00$1 at news.t-online.com>,
> 	Michael Kraemer <M.Kraemer at gsi.de> writes:
> 
>>
>>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.
> 
> 
> And why do you think that was?  We had a Professor here who actually
> bought one for a specific research project.  Imagine his surprise to
> find out there was no software for it beyond the OS.  Well, there was
> Linux, but not  much commercial to run on that.

That's it, exactly. It's not the marketing,
it's the product itself which hasn't enough
incentives to justify the significantly higher price tag.

> 
>>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.
> 
> 
> It's all about management.  In a pinch you get the chips fabbed by someone
> else until you can ramp up your capabilities.

If it were that easy, why did DEC build a fab on their own at all?
Would have been much less hassle and cheaper to let someone else do it,
just like Sparc and Mips did.

>>
>>Mass market via VMS is just wishful thinking.
>>I can't imagine typical PC customer falling in love
>>with directories in square brackets.
> 
> 
> Funny, that didn't slow down the rapid advance of Linux and BSD. 

Linux and BSD have "directories in square brackets"?
What was the name of the marketing firm again
who create all the ads for Linus Torvalds?
(Must have been missing something in the past few years ...)

> And,
> remember, there was also Windows NT for the Alpha. 

That's what the hardware ran I was referring to.
Except AXPvme, which ran VxWorks.
A military project, btw, so you should know.

> Not to mention that
> by the time Alpha made the scene there already was a good GUI environment
> for VMS.  The only things missing were software and marketing.

Software? yes, that was missing, but marketing?
As said, the Vobis Alpha PCs were exposed the same
way as the other consumer PCs of that German
retailer.