[Info-vax] RealWorldTech on Poulson

[John Wallace]

On Jul 4, 11:19 pm, Michael Kraemer <M.Krae... at gsi.de> wrote:
> Phillip Helbig---undress to reply schrieb:
>
> > This was about 1995
>
> (snip)
>
>
>
> > What went wrong?
>
> As already explained: the years lost in the beginning
> not only meant just another delay in time to market,
> it gave the competition a head start of three years
> or more to build their ecosystem.
> By the time HP, Sun, even IBM reaped the benefits
> of the open systems move, DEC started from scratch
> with Alpha, OSF, VMS, almost everything they had to
> offer in 1993 was little more than beta
> (except VAX and Ultrix of course)

Ultrix-32 ran on VAX quite nicely. If I remember rightly, what was
then HP Labs in Bristol got one of the first (maybe the first) VAX
Ultrix system (a 785?) in the UK. No I don't remember why.

After VAX Ultrix there was the DECstation and DECsystem family of MIPS-
based systems running Ultrix-32. They had limited visibility inside
DEC; HQ in general preferred people to sell VAX and VMS unless people
were desperate for UNIX, and when they were desperate for UNIX the
salesforce were often out of their depth (exceptions apply).

Then "the market" started talking about "open systems", and DEC HQ
understandably believed them. DEC backed both OSF for software (as an
alternative to VMS, which was briefly POSIX compliant if you wanted
it) and OSI for networking. But when the market came to sign the
orders, what they mostly actually wanted was "cheap" rather than
"open", hence Windows and TCP/IP.

Not sure what any of this has got to do with IA64, which is neither
open nor cheap. But it does run VMS. For now.