[Info-vax] RealWorldTech on Poulson

[JF Mezei]

1 To state that DEC did try to pitch Alpha to the PC market may be
technically true, but only technically.

To penetrate a market, you need to have staying power and invest in
marketing. You don't just introduce a product and if it doesn't pan out
within 6 months declare that attempt failed and pull out.

DEC pulled out of the PC market before Alpha was given a REAL chance of
succeeding.

Look at Microsoft. It has staying power and despite all its failures in
the mobile market it is still going at it, and with each iteration, it
mamages to win some sideline market (for instance: Ford Sync,  TV  set
top controllers which also brought in sales for the entire IPTV product
line (Media Center).



2- It may be true that the initial iterations of Alpha were not
impressive. But that is because they focused first on building a very
strong foundation that was clean and would let the architecture grow
over at least 2 decades.

So if you view an architecture as a long term investment, it was the
right decision  Had EV7 been properly funded and come out a few years
earier, it would have clearly beat the pants off the other guys, and
that is because the original foundation was done right and now, the
engineering could focus on building around it instead of having to
rewrite it.

Considerable effort was spent rewriting the 8086 from scratch to grow it
from its 8/16 bit iplementation (8088 for the original IBM PC) to 32
bits and now to 64 bits, and rewrite the engine under the hood to make
it RISC like.

Now, IA64 is set to b rewritten as well, accepting that EPIC was a
mistake and trying to move that product to a more viable philosophy.

Note that in 1999, DEC engineers were telling DEC customers that EPIC
was a flawed concept for busiess computing because compilers cannot
predict what data will be processed.  It isn't as if the failure of EPIC
 is only now being realised.