[Info-vax] RealWorldTech on Poulson

[Richard B. Gilbert]

On 7/4/2011 5:40 PM, Phillip Helbig---undress to reply wrote:
> 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?
>

To make a long story short, Digital priced itself right out of the market.