[Info-vax] Did Ken Olsen kill Alpha?

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2011-10-20 12.52, Neil Rieck wrote:
> I agree with almost everything you posted here except the VAX9000
> comment. In the book "DEC is dead, long live DEC" (which is a post
> mortem based upon employee interviews, there is a lot of input from
> Gordon Bell (he actually wrote all of Appendix "E") where he makes
> good arguments as to why computer architectures are only good for ten
> years or so, and that the time was right for DEC to move from 32-bit
> CISC (VAX) to 64-bit RISC (Alpha), just as DEC had done 10 years
> earlier in 1977 when they moved from 16-bit PDP (supporting physical
> memory) to 32-bit VAX (supporting virtual memory).

Nit pick: both the PDP-11 and VAX support virtual memory. The VAX was 
design to support demand paging, which not all PDP-11s could, but more 
to the point, no PDP-11 operating system implemented (little point when 
you only have 8 pages).

That the VAX 9000 was a flop is well known. And it did cost DEC a 
handsome sum to learn. But DEC was by no means dead, or even seriously 
hurting after having done the VAX 9000. It took another 10 years for DEC 
to go down.

	Johnny