[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:
> 
> There was more to VME on Alpha than military although obviously
> defence stuff was a large part of the VME market in general. CSS was a
> part of DEC that got a lot of revenue from military stuff, though
> whether it was always as much as the books appeared to show is
> debatable. There's a book for someone to write about some of the
> things that went on in CSS.
> 
> There was at least one German outfit (Atlas Elektronik GmbH?) that
> designed and built their own VME/Alpha system(s) but I can't remember
> the details or easily find a reference.
> 
> VMS was not the intended market for the VME kit, VxWorks and Tru64
> were, although some customers in some markets would have loved to have
> a VME-native Alpha card running VMS, rather than the hassle of
> integrating a PCI-based (or, earlier, TURBOchannel-based) Alpha with a
> VME adapter from DEC or elsewhere.

Alpha was the last choice I would consider for embedded stuff.
But in military one obviously has enough resources to make pigs fly.
Probably DEC simply wanted to test if this will pan out in civilian
too, but I guess the inertia of the market is as large as in PC desktop
space.
 
> "the Vobis Alpha PCs were exposed the same way as the other consumer
> PCs of that German retailer."
> 
> Maybe they were, but Vobis were largely a general PC builder and the
> general PC market quickly found out that although MS had told Palmer
> they were supporting non-x86 systems, MS didn't actually deliver what
> they promised (who else remembers the Advanced RISC Computing
> consortium? NT used to run on MIPS and PowerPC too).

Nevertheless this would have been the only sector
where they could get the alpha out of the 100000 chips per year limbo.