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

[Michael Kraemer]

In article <fc922f13-6278-445f-9810-0b30b889a241 at a36g2000yqc.googlegroups.com>,
John Wallace <johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk> writes:
> On Aug 23, 1:24=A0am, Michael Kraemer <M.Krae... at gsi.de> wrote:
> 
> "Would have been much less hassle and cheaper to let someone else do
> it,
> just like Sparc and Mips did."
> 
> Which is why history records that Mitsubishi, Samsung, (and others?)
> had Alpha technology licences (design and fab in Samsung's case).
> Samsung even actually used their licence to build and sell things.

And their impact on Alpha's ecosystem was exactly what?
In my imagination Mitsubishi primarily makes cars and
heavy industrial hardware, and Samsung is known for consumer electronics
and DRAM chips. No comparison with the alliances involving real CPU makers
like Apple/IBM/Motorola, HP/Intel, Sparc/TI etc.
I don't know if it's just another urban legend,
but story goes that before switching to PPC, Apple had an
eye on the early Alpha, but Olsen (not Palmer!) refused the deal.


> History also records that if you want to make the most out of a given
> generation of fab, you have the fab's process people working as
> closely as possible with the chip's design people, so they know just
> what the fab can really do for the chip. A bit like Intel do. On the
> other hand, AMD and ARM successfully do without fabs, and to a lesser
> extent so did MIPS and SPARC.

So DEC was right to have own fab and reserve capacities?