[Info-vax] Current VMS Usage Survey

[Bill Gunshannon]

In article <l7rgqg$aen$1 at solani.org>,
	Michael Kraemer <M.Kraemer at gsi.de> writes:
> Bill Gunshannon schrieb:
> 
>> Intel had others that have had even more success than Itanium.  Like
>> Arm.  :-)
> 
> They never "had" ARM.

OK, my mistake.  I thought I had seen that they were producing ARM CPS's.

> 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

Isn't StronARM just a different variant of ARM?  Like Sparc and ULTRASparc.

> 
>> 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.
> 

Techie benchmarks may be fun, but they don't pay the mortgage.

> 
> 
>> 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,

I don't know about that.  We had a Physics Professor who bought one
for a grant suported project.  He loved it.  Ended out putting Linux
on it because he cold not get applications to run under NT on it.  I
always figured it was the lack of applications that most likely caused
NT/Alpha's demise. (Where have we heard that before?)

> and I remember a Vobis employee saying that it
> was an entirely useless product, no matter at
> what price they offered it.

Interesting.  I think it may have been doing better over here.

> 
>>> 
>>>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.

The version I heard was a little bit different.  It wasn't that
couldn't deliver it was that IBM wanted first dibs.  They expected
Motorola to short their other customers in order to meet whatever
IBM's demand was.  Motorola, supposedly, was unwilling to do that
to their existing customer base.

> If there were a first price for inapt management,
> I would award it to Motorola's, not DEC's.

I would award it to Exxon (as regards the Z80 debacle.)

bill
 

-- 
Bill Gunshannon          |  de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n.  Three wolves
billg999 at cs.scranton.edu |  and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
University of Scranton   |
Scranton, Pennsylvania   |         #include <std.disclaimer.h>