[Info-vax] RealWorldTech on Poulson

[Phillip Helbig---undress to reply]

In article
<db641605-1816-415e-9a4b-109629d4eca5 at v12g2000vby.googlegroups.com>,
John Wallace <johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk> writes: 

> By the time the DIGITAL Personal Workstation(433, 500 and 600MHz,
> fwiw) came out, the basic prices were reasonably competitive compared
> with similarly configured UNIX workstations from other vendors (sorry,
> no references right now).

I remember once we had about DM 150,000 or so and wanted to buy the most
computing power possible.  This was about 1995 (we reckoned DM 100 per
MB for RAM, just to keep things in perspective; times have changed!). 
At the time, we had only early-1990s RS6000 machines.  So, we got test
machines from IBM, DEC, HP, SUN and SGI and ran our own applications on
them.  The SUN was quick on an application which was I/O bound,
otherwise HP and DEC were much better than the other three.  We went
with DEC (ALPHAstation 500) because the compilers were better than HP's.
So, this was DEC getting a new customer based purely on
price/performance (and compiler quality) when running the customer's own
(self-written) applications. 

What went wrong?