[Info-vax] Linux support

[David Froble]

Scott Dorsey wrote:
> David Froble  <davef at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
>> Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>>
>>> Probably the
>>> biggest factor in the demise of Alpha was Microsoft dropping
>>> support for it.
>> I don't buy that, because I've always felt that VMS's strength was not 
>> on the desktop.
> 
> That's the point.  If you wanted a desktop machine, you could get an Alpha
> with Windows.  if you wanted a server you could get an Alpha with VMS or
> with OSF/1.  Take Microsoft out of that equation and you can't sell so many
> Alphas and the economies of scale collapse.
> --scott
> 

Another way of saying that is that if there wasn't a desktop niche for 
VMS, then there never was such economies of scale.  Then Alpha would 
have had to prosper with the non-desktop volume.

People wanted cheap, and at the quantities that could be sold, Alpha 
wasn't going to be cheap, which caused the quantities to go down even more.

 From that perspective, the people at DEC wanted something they were not 
going to get.  But what's interesting to me is, I feel that the users 
who needed VMS systems would have paid whatever it cost, within reason. 
  I seem to recall seeing customers pay a quarter million or more for a 
system, $40,000 disk drives, and such.  With today's commodities, what 
would an Alpha based system cost, if adequate cost for the CPUs were 
used along with the commodity prices for the rest of the system?

I'll make the bold statement that those who are still using VMS today 
would pay a bit extra for the CPU in order to continue using VMS.  Most 
wouldn't really have any reasonable other choice.  Not that the number 
of current users would support, at any reasonable price, continued Alpha 
development.  Might have been different in the past before so many 
stopped using VMS.

I feel that the mistake was feeling that they (DEC) had to compete with 
the price of commodity CPUs.  IBM doesn't seem to have that same 
restriction, and Power still exists.

If DEC had wanted to sell cheap VMS desktops, they should have kept the 
N-VAX production line going, churned out super cheap N-VAX CPUs, and 
built systems to match.  x86 didn't go to 64 bits until long after Alpha 
was gone.  DEC's failure was in not using what strengths they had.  Of 
course, in moving into a commodity environment, they would have had to 
find another way to support the large number of employees they had.