[Info-vax] Reading Gordon Bell's VAX strategy document

[Neil Rieck]

On Sunday, September 24, 2023 at 10:10:45 AM UTC-4, John Dallman wrote:
> Gordon Bell, who was Vice-President of Engineering at DEC 1972-83 is 
> still alive and documenting much of his life on the web. There's DEC 
> stuff at https://gordonbell.azurewebsites.net/Digital/DECMuseum.htm 
> 
> Something particularly interesting is this document on DEC strategy as of 
> 1979: 
> 
> https://gordonbell.azurewebsites.net/Digital/VAX%20Strategy%20c1979.pdf 
> 
> At the time, DEC's other active product ranges were PDP-8, DEC-10/DEC-20 
> and PDP-11. They had decided in 1975 to create an architecture that built 
> upwards from the PDP-11, rather than building lower-cost DEC-10 machines. 
> The reasons for doing that were the large installed base of PDP-11s and 
> the convenience of 8-bit bytes for data communications, especially with 
> IBM mainframes. 
> 
> As of 1978/70 they had achieved this and were deciding what to do next. 
> The strategy expressed in this document is to continue to sell the other 
> ranges, but concentrate development efforts on the VAX family, and that's 
> what basically happened. Using a single architecture is seen as a 
> competitive advantage against IBM's proliferation of incompatible 
> architectures, which is pretty reasonable, since IBM saw the same problem. 
> 
> 
> Bell regards competition from "zero cost" microprocessors such as the 
> 8086 and 68000 as likely more significant than other minicomputer 
> companies, but fails to make a plan to deal with them. DEC was eventually 
> defeated by 80386 and later PCs and RISC workstations, and that failure 
> seems to start here. He assumes that DEC can dominate the market for 
> terminals for its minis by using PDP-11 and VAX microprocessors, but 
> doesn't seem to realise that compatible terminals can be built at much 
> lower cost using third-party microprocessors. In any case, the 
> replacement of minis by PCs and workstations meant that the terminal 
> market basically vanished. 
> 
> The idea of running VMS on a terminal with a total of 64KB of RAM and ROM 
> in 1982 seems implausible now, but it seems to have been the reason for 
> 512-byte pages. Bell praises the extremely compact VAX instruction set 
> and its elaborate function calls, without appreciating the ways they will 
> come to inhibit pipelining and out-of-order execution, and thus doom the 
> architecture to uncompetitive performance. 
> 
> John

For people needing more information on this topic, purchase a copy of "DEC Is Dead, Long Live DEC" (2003-2004) by Edgar H. Schein. Appendix E was written by Gordon Bell. The book was commissioned by Ken Olson as a post-mortem warning to other American companies.

https://neilrieck.net/docs/recommended_books_technology.html#dec

The Coles Notes version of the story centers around missed opportunities, and mistakes, by DEC as the industry shifted from CISC to RISC. Then bad advice at the top decided to bet the farm on CISC in the form of the water-cooled Aquarius (VAX-9000). A huge amount of money was also wasted when DEC decided to manufacture their own chips (Alpha) at Hudson Mass.

I work for a Canadian telecom so we spread our purchases across many companies. I still recall working on a VAX-8550 dual-host cluster (1987-1988) in Toronto when people down the hall had just purchased a 32-bit SPARC server from SUN, which was much smaller than our VAX cluster but was much faster. Over the next 15 years my employer bought a lot of SUN hardware which grew larger but was always faster. I work in Canada where there are two official languages (English + French) and it goes without saying that UNIX always did a better job supporting international character sets, at a time when many American companies refused to move beyond ASCII.

But for me, DEC's hatred for C, UNIX and TCPIP was just plain stupid since 16-bit PDP and 32-bit VAX were responsible for creating ARPAnet.
https://neilrieck.net/links/cool_computer.html#internet
Working on a VAX, once Bill Joy had rewritten all the new libraries in C, they raced from university to university. 

Back in 1992, I was working on a VAX-6000 when my employer asked me to install a TCP/IP stack. We were instructed to buy the software from Process Software because DEC's product was still considered experimental. Once on TCPware, we stuck with that product on VAX and Alpha. We would have stayed with it for Itanium but since TCPware didn't support IPv6 we migrated to MultiNet.

Neil Rieck
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
http://neilrieck.net