[Info-vax] Steve Jobes [was: Apple says ...]

[Bob Eager]

On Sun, 09 Oct 2011 09:55:49 +0000, Phillip Helbig---undress to reply
wrote:

> John Wallace <johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk> writes:
> 
>> By the time the PCI Alphas came out, based largely on commodity
>> technology, the system prices were entirely competitive with other
>> vendors boxes. Sun and IBM sites where I took an Alpha on loan
>> typically said "why has no one showed us these before". This applied in
>> particular to the Solaris users who saw Tru64. The sites I visited were
>> typically technical sites who didn't need much more than an OS, a
>> compiler, and probably a database, so the alleged lack of apps was a
>> non-issue to them.
> 
> Right.
> 
>> There was an issue when the same hardware could run either NT or Tru64
>> or VMS. To compete with PCs, the NT flavour had to be sensibly priced,
>> and was. To recover the VMS/Tru64 development costs the OS had to have
>> a price premium whilst staying competitive agains UNIX boxes, and it
>> was (at least in the UK).
> 
> Right.
> 
>> What in my experience was a disaster for the company was the general
>> unwillingness of country level management to move out of the comfort
>> zone of the installed base, or for the level above that to attempt to
>> compete head on with Intel. Given Intel's history, it should be obvious
>> why there was a reluctance to compete head on, even if the relevant
>> management had had the capability and willingness.
> 
> I think the main reason for the demise of DEC was its demise in academia
> first.  When DEC was big in academia, lots of people had VMS experience,
> and this carried over to non-academic jobs.  VMS people were just as
> cheap as unix people to hire.  First, DEC lost academia, then it
> snowballed.
> 
> Why did it lose out in academia?  Lack of marketing?  Maybe, but it was
> primarily due to unix types who thought unix was cool and VMS wasn't. By
> comparing new unix kit to old VMS kit, they managed to convince
> management that VMS hardware was too expensive (with DECcampus licenses,
> software costs were not an issue).

Certainly here in the UK, all costs were an issue at my academic 
institution:

- high hardware costs
- high maintenance costs
- high software costs

We'd been using UNIX for 11 years, before VMS came in 1986. The two co-
existed fine - VMS was the workhorse for the campus, and some departments 
used UNIX (including CS).



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