[Info-vax] BOINC for VMS

[John Wallace]

On Mar 15, 4:43 am, David Froble <da... at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
> Keith Parris wrote:
> > On 3/13/2012 5:01 PM, Michael Kraemer wrote:
> >> Well, it was Olsen who was reluctant to bring Alpha to market
> >> (if, for example, that Apple story is true).
> >> It didn't happen until Palmer took over.
>
> > Incorrect. The Alpha Project started in the late '80s. Olsen was removed
> > in 1992, just before Alpha shipped.
>
> Well, the way I remember it, Ken wanted to extend the VAX, not create a new RISC
> processor.  Regardless, on his watch the Alpha got it's start.
>
> Frankly, while I doubt it would have matched the Alpha, I think the VAX still had a lot of
> life to it, and with 64 bit extensions, might have been interesting, and perhaps wouldn't
> have needed that Hudson FAB which cost so much.
>
> Note that I have no way of knowing how well such development might have done, nor do I
> know what kind of costs might have been incurred.  What I do know is that the N-VAX CPU
> continued to sell well through the 1990s.  A PC killer?  Who knows?  If something like
> windows had been developed for it as a user interface?  Yes, I'm aware of DECwindows, and
> good or bad, the apps for it to be a desktop user interface just weren't there.  Can you
> imagine anyone at DEC building a computer for games?  Another case of "stop the
> development", and the product is doomed to die.

"the apps for it to be a desktop user interface just weren't there"

The potential customers almost certainly wouldn't have known about the
capabilities of a DECwindows workstation, but there was plenty of
interesting stuff around, from DEC and others, both in applications
and technologies. Old apps had new technologies added, using
architected mechanisms such as Compound Document Architecture and
LiveLinks (the precursor to Windows Object Linking and Embedding etc).
VAXnotes did pictures and sound, if you wanted it to and had the
hardware capability.

Remember CDE? It may not have been perfect but it was the standards
based non-proprietary "industry standard" desktop environment of the
time, and it was shipped with DECwindows.

DEC even had a set of standards-based secure tamper-resistant compound-
document (ie WYSIWYG etc) email products and no I don't mean the All-
in-1 stuff though one of them was called All-in-1 just for confusion.

Just think how much spam and phishing we'd have these days if the
world's ISPs had chosen X.400 (which needed money, compute power and
expertise) and not SMTP/POP/MIME (which were free, ran on a teletype-
era computer, and had and still have no requirement for those
operating the mail service to know much about anything).

But getting hold of a workstation (and an expert) either for internal
use within DEC to show off their capabilities or for use with a
customer was hard work before the days of Alpha.

"Can you imagine anyone at DEC building a computer for games?"

If you meant selling a computer for someone else to build a games
system round, then yes, I don't have to imagine it. What I can't do is
imagine DEC (HQ, field sales in general, or mostly anywhere in
between) putting much focus on that market for very long. But then I
don't have to imagine it because I was there in the "embedded and
realtime" business group who were targeted at selling stuff to people
who saw computers as components or equipment, not just something for
the IT department, not something where the best growth tactic was
touted as "selling up" by adding extra storage or extra warranty to a
system sale that would have happened anyway.

In its later years, the E+RT group in the UK sold more workstations
than the workstation folks ever did, primarily to providers of control
systems who wanted stable reliable computing networking and GUI
platforms so they could focus on theiry factory automation or
electricity distribution or transport/traffic control or C3I or SS7 or
whatever. The products were there by that stage, and the few customers
who ever got to see them usually quite liked (even the price).

But E+RT didn't fit the HQ-based strategic "sell up" business model,
so E+RT (and its handful of interesting E+RT specific products such as
VME based systems and PICMG systems and ...) got sold off, initially
to SMART Modular Technologies, who were then bought by Force (part of
Motorola).

Then not surprisingly it largely disappeared.