[Info-vax] "x86 has only a few years left in the market place"

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2018-05-21 17:48, seasoned_geek wrote:
> On Monday, May 21, 2018 at 10:30:27 AM UTC-5, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
>> On 2018-05-21 14:38:23 +0000, seasoned_geek said:
>>
>>>
>>> There was always call, it was never delivered. At it's height when DEC
>>> still was DEC and we were pushing into data centers with massive blue
>>> iron we kept failing the minimum throughput tests at the companies who
>>> wanted the cost savings and robustness of VMS but could not/would not
>>> sacrifice throughput.
>>
>> DEC at its height was a rather different era of computing, and most of
>> thirty years ago.  Given that DEC wasn't able to profitably build big
>> iron that met those throughput requirements?   The so-called VAX
>> mainframe didn't do all that well in the market, after all.
> 
> The 9000 died because DEC released the Alpha the following year __AND__ it still had abysmal I/O.

I think the failure of the 9000 had more to do with NVAX being released 
about the same time, and more or less outperform the 9000, while costing 
close to nothing in comparison.

But yes, DEC did do big iron back in the past, and then pissed all of 
those customers off by killing the architecture after promises of new 
machines again and again. And insisting that the customers migrate to 
VMS, which was rather inferior compared to TOPS-20 (and refusing to 
implement most of the good stuff from TOPS-20 on VMS). Almost none of 
those customers migrated to VAX/VMS, and most of them swore to never use 
DEC again.

That was bad for their big machine business market. After that, DEC was 
pretty much restricted to mostly existing customers and the mini market, 
and for a while networking which was better than any competition. And 
that sold VMS quite well for a while. But at the price DEC wanted, 
workstations and later PCs pretty much ate DEC up from beneath.

   Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
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