[Info-vax] Current VMS Usage Survey
Michael Kraemer
M.Kraemer at gsi.de
Thu Dec 5 22:37:52 EST 2013
Bill Gunshannon schrieb:
> Intel had others that have had even more success than Itanium. Like
> Arm. :-)
They never "had" ARM.
Iirc they inherited StrongARM in that 1997 DEC deal,
and that was canned and developers wouldn't work for
intel, see the Alasir pages,
http://alasir.com/articles/alpha_history/dec_collapse.shtml
> No, I'm not. I'm a techie. (And, no, I am not insulted by the epithet!)
Well, in particular techies managed to squeeze out significant
Linpack GFLOPS from this chip.
SGI and even IBM built some supercomputers around it so it
made at least a short-lived appearance in the TOP500.
> Yeah, butt he marginal sales may well have been due to the fact that it
> got killed before third parties even had a chance to get products out
> the door.
Wrong timeline.
It was 1999
when support and development of NT/Alpha was cancelled by Compaq,
and in retaliation M$ cancelled their server products and said
64bit NT would be Itanic only.
That was the end, full six years after introduction of
Alpha boxes, more than enough time to develop products.
Alpha itself was EOL'ed another two years later.
It has been discussed several times here:
German PC retailer Vobis had Alpha/NT boxes
for sale twice in the 1990s, in the very beginning
and around 1996/97.
They had them on display and mentioned in their
marketing flyers and in the trade press.
Nobody except a few alpha fanatics wanted them,
and I remember a Vobis employee saying that it
was an entirely useless product, no matter at
what price they offered it.
>>
>>The world would be a better place if IBM had made a wiser decision.
>
>
> Wisdom had nothing to do with it. Ethics (or the lack thereof) did.
I don't remember ethical issues.
The usual story is that the 68K was seen as too new, no second source,
and, as usual, Motorola couldn't deliver enough and in time.
If there were a first price for inapt management,
I would award it to Motorola's, not DEC's.
More information about the Info-vax
mailing list