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Andrew
*nix forums Guru
Joined: 24 Feb 2005
Posts: 387
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 Posted: Fri Jul 21, 2006 1:16 pm Post subject:
Re: Alpha remembrance day
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Michael Kraemer wrote:
| Quote: | Andrew schrieb:
3. Having managed to create an ecosystem for Ultrix/MIPS DEC started
the Alpha development project in 1989 with no real intentions of
porting Ultrix to Alpha or providing any remotely sensible migration
path from Ultrix to Tru64.
The Alpha introduction in 1992 with the inevitable Ultrix demise that
followed left all DEC's partners in the Ultrix/MIPS ecosystem
floundering, customers ran for the hills hotly pursued by sales teams
from Sun, IBM, HP, SGI etc waving blank order forms. (See sales
peoples commision later)
Had Alpha been introduced with a sensible Ultrix migration plan or even
running Ultrix as Sun had done with SunOS and SPARC and had DEC not
apparently wilfully shrunk their ISV software portfolio then it is
possible that Alpha/UNIX could have captured the 20-30% of the UNIX
market once commanded by Ultrix.
One might be tempted to speculate what would have happened
if DEC never started alpha development. If they'd just bought half of
Mips and continued with Ultrix/MIPS, making it a more viable platform.
Could have saved them loads of $$$ which could have been used
for VAX performance boosts. This might have bought a few
more years for VAX/VMS,
during which Ultrix could have picked up some VMS features,
enough to let VMS slip into oblivion.
Certainly not a nice vision for VMS bigots, but it might
have saved DEC as a company.
|
When Alpha was launched one analyst I think it was Michael Slater made
exactly that point about MIPS. One view at the time was that Digital
had done Alpha instead of partnering with Motorola, IBM, MIPS or Sun
because designing and building their own processor because this fitted
with Digitals view of its position in the technology market.
One thing is pretty clear doing Alpha had a huge impact on Digitals
financial viability. Working with MIPS would have avoided the huge
outlays required to design Alpha and the even bigger outlays of
building and running the Hudson and Scottish Fabrication plants.
Regards
Andrew Harrison |
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Andrew
*nix forums Guru
Joined: 24 Feb 2005
Posts: 387
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| Posted: Fri Jul 21, 2006 1:07 pm Post subject:
Re: Alpha remembrance day
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Bill Todd wrote:
| Quote: | Andrew wrote:
Bill Todd wrote:
Andrew wrote:
Bill Todd wrote:
etmsreec@yahoo.co.uk wrote:
Well, that's one view.
Can
you say "lack of applications"? Can you say "lack of operating systems
to run on it"?
Can you say "incompetent blowhard?" I think David addressed that latter
chimera adequately, and given that one of said OSs was Windows
(including support of x86 application binaries) I'd say that puts the
former to rest as well (not to say that VMS and Tru64 didn't have
adequate application support in their own right, of course).
I read this post with some amusement for a number of reasons.
Unfortunately, overlooking probably the best one - for which you would
have had to have been looking in a mirror.
Really.
Of course, Andrew: unlike you, I don't bluster interminably about
things I know little or nothing about - I rely more on fact.
And you follow that by rolling out the same old blame it on Palmer,
Curly and Carly nonsense. How hugely ammusing.
I sincerely hope that your spelling ability (or lack thereof) as
evidenced over your years here is not characteristic of the quality of
England's educational system: it's discouraging enough that the U.S.'s
is so bad.
The sad reality is that Alphas woes and eventual demise may have been
exacerbated or at least allowed to get worse by Palmer/Curly etc but
the seeds for Alphas decline were sown by DEC and their senior
management in the 80's before any of your favourite culprits were in
the frame.
Now, that would be quite a feat, wouldn't it? Since Alpha didn't even
*appear on the scene* until Palmer was in charge (1992), and obviously
didn't reach its peak market penetration until considerably thereafter
(I suspect not long before the Alphacide), dating the start of its
*decline* earlier than its birth is - well, pretty typical of the level
of intelligence that you usually display, I guess.
|
What a truly ludicrous point. By the time Palmer came on the scene in
1992 Alpha had been a fully funded project since 1989 and was itself a
followon from PRISM. The decisions to design and build Alpha and the
decisions about what OS platforms it would support and what migration
options would be offered to existing customers had already been made.
The only thing Palmer could have done at that point was cancelled the
project.
As a perspective on Alpha from a rather better informed source than you
read the comments made by Michael Slater in an interview in 1992 after
Alpha's announcement.
UPSIDE: We didn't talk much about the Alpha chip. Is it going to be a
world-beater?
SLATER: I don't think so. Alpha is an outstanding piece of technology.
It is probably superior architecture to the architectures that exist,
but I don't believe the differences are big enough to overcome the fact
that it is very late entering the market. There is an enormous amount
of inertia and software base that DEC has to fight. Every company that
DEC goes out to convince to make Alpha chips or to build systems with
Alpha, every one of those companies over the last few years has been
pitched by Sun for Sparc, pitched by Mips, then HP for PA RISC, then
pitched by IBM for RS/6000.
How precient of him the reasons for the death of Alpha spelt out in
1992 just after its launch.
| Quote: |
1. DEC failed to catch the RISC wave first time around, not through
lack of projects but through lack of direction. Not 1 but 4 and bit
projects were started and cancelled by DEC, Titan, SAFE, HR-32, CASCADE
and finally PRISM which metamophosed out of CASCADE. This is one of a
number of examples which illustrate what a massive understatement your
"(though not always ideally-focused) " comment is.
This lost DEC market share to Sun, HP, IBM and SGI/MIPS.
But of course (as I already noted above, but since you're both rather
slow on the uptake and obstinate in your ignorance it bears repeating),
this could not possibly have caused Alpha's *decline*, since Alpha
wouldn't even appear for a few years yet.
|
Lack of velocity seems to be a trait that you are suffering from. DEC's
inability to choose a project and stick to it, their lateness and the
stop gap tactic of doing a MIPS based platform lost them momentum,
market share, customer and ISV loyalty. When Alpha came out it was too
late entering as it did a market that was now crowded with other RISC
processors competing for ISV and design wins, DEC were unprofitable and
had lost their status as the alternative to IBM to Sun and HP.
Ever heard of the phrase Honeymoon Period
Alpha benefited from a relatively brief honeymoon influenced by its
newness, its support for 64bit and its speed. The honeymoon quickly
ended when the underlying issues of ISV support, customer loyalty,
market share etc which were all caused by Digitals actions in the 7 or
so years leading up to the Alpha release.
| Quote: |
2. Having belatedly realised that VAX wasn't going to survive the
onslaught of the RISC processors DEC initiated the short lived MIPS
platform running Ultrix a plaform seriously hampered by the fact that
DEC had not only missed catching the RISC wave but had also failed to
catch the UNIX wave as well. DEC sales people prefered selling VMS/VAX
and senior management openly denigrated UNIX while funding a product
division to develop it. Sounds mad now.
This lost DEC market share to Sun, HP, IBM and SGI who had no such
qualms about selling UNIX.
But (yet again) this couldn't possibly have contributed to the *decline*
of a product which had not even been introduced yet. In fact, if
anything it gave Alpha a lower starting point from which regaining lost
market share might have been easier than beginning with more of it.
|
Of course it could see above. When customers, partners etc no longer
see you as a safe pair of hands because of previous product and
strategy mishaps then the chances of your latest and greatest product
in this case Alpha being a sucess are significantly diminished.
| Quote: |
3. Having managed to create an ecosystem for Ultrix/MIPS DEC started
the Alpha development project in 1989 with no real intentions of
porting Ultrix to Alpha or providing any remotely sensible migration
path from Ultrix to Tru64.
So what? Once again, this (debatable) intent at Alpha's birth could not
possibly have caused it to *decline* - it could at worst have limited
its growth (and indeed did for years in the Unix marketplace, as I
already observed). Idiot.
|
Trust, momentum, idiot.
| Quote: |
The Alpha introduction in 1992 with the inevitable Ultrix demise that
followed left all DEC's partners in the Ultrix/MIPS ecosystem
floundering, customers ran for the hills hotly pursued by sales teams
from Sun, IBM, HP, SGI etc waving blank order forms. (See sales
peoples commision later)
Since I already observed that the Unix vacillations you describe above
contributed to a slow ramp-up for Tru64 on Alpha, I'm really not sure
what your regurgitation was meant to accomplish (though it seems clear
that whatever it may have been, it had nothing to do with your
ridiculous contention that Alpha 'declined' due to lack of applications
rather than simply had an up-hill battle to fight on the Unix front due
to earlier missteps by DEC).
4. DEC started out as an alternative to IBM but ended up becoming a
mini IBM without the deep pockets or market share. DEC history is
littered with strategies that apparently had nothing to do with what
customers were asking for and everything to do with what DEC though
customers wanted.
Actually, most of 'DEC history' (up through at least the early '80s,
which is well over half of its 40-year span) is a testament to how well
one can succeed by listening to customers and trying to give them what
they need. And the suggestion that DEC 'started out as an alternative
to IBM' simply reflects your own ignorance (or possibly incompetent
exposition): DEC began life as a module vendor, not a computer
manufacturer at all, blossomed by addressing smaller, interactive
computing markets that IBM largely ignored, and only began encroaching
significantly on IBM's territory after VAX appeared (while DEC's earlier
36-bit mainframes overlapped IBM's offerings in capabilities, they
tended to be sold with a significantly different viewpoint).
|
Of course it did, but by the mid 80's when the events that sealed
Alpha's fate started to unfold Digital was the alternative to IBM.
I have snipped the rest of your response because you clearly don't get
the point and sadly you never will. Regretably this means that
unsuspecting readers in 10 years time are likely to be subject to more
Gound Hog Day type ramblings on your part about the Alphacide and
Palmer, Curly's and Carly's part in it.
Regards
Andrew Harrison |
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Bill Todd
*nix forums Guru
Joined: 24 Jul 2005
Posts: 408
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| Posted: Fri Jul 21, 2006 12:59 am Post subject:
Re: Alpha remembrance day
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Andrew wrote:
| Quote: | Bill Todd wrote:
Andrew wrote:
Bill Todd wrote:
etmsreec@yahoo.co.uk wrote:
Well, that's one view.
Can
you say "lack of applications"? Can you say "lack of operating systems
to run on it"?
Can you say "incompetent blowhard?" I think David addressed that latter
chimera adequately, and given that one of said OSs was Windows
(including support of x86 application binaries) I'd say that puts the
former to rest as well (not to say that VMS and Tru64 didn't have
adequate application support in their own right, of course).
I read this post with some amusement for a number of reasons.
Unfortunately, overlooking probably the best one - for which you would
have had to have been looking in a mirror.
Really.
|
Of course, Andrew: unlike you, I don't bluster interminably about
things I know little or nothing about - I rely more on fact.
| Quote: |
And you follow that by rolling out the same old blame it on Palmer,
Curly and Carly nonsense. How hugely ammusing.
|
I sincerely hope that your spelling ability (or lack thereof) as
evidenced over your years here is not characteristic of the quality of
England's educational system: it's discouraging enough that the U.S.'s
is so bad.
| Quote: |
The sad reality is that Alphas woes and eventual demise may have been
exacerbated or at least allowed to get worse by Palmer/Curly etc but
the seeds for Alphas decline were sown by DEC and their senior
management in the 80's before any of your favourite culprits were in
the frame.
|
Now, that would be quite a feat, wouldn't it? Since Alpha didn't even
*appear on the scene* until Palmer was in charge (1992), and obviously
didn't reach its peak market penetration until considerably thereafter
(I suspect not long before the Alphacide), dating the start of its
*decline* earlier than its birth is - well, pretty typical of the level
of intelligence that you usually display, I guess.
| Quote: |
1. DEC failed to catch the RISC wave first time around, not through
lack of projects but through lack of direction. Not 1 but 4 and bit
projects were started and cancelled by DEC, Titan, SAFE, HR-32, CASCADE
and finally PRISM which metamophosed out of CASCADE. This is one of a
number of examples which illustrate what a massive understatement your
"(though not always ideally-focused) " comment is.
This lost DEC market share to Sun, HP, IBM and SGI/MIPS.
|
But of course (as I already noted above, but since you're both rather
slow on the uptake and obstinate in your ignorance it bears repeating),
this could not possibly have caused Alpha's *decline*, since Alpha
wouldn't even appear for a few years yet.
| Quote: |
2. Having belatedly realised that VAX wasn't going to survive the
onslaught of the RISC processors DEC initiated the short lived MIPS
platform running Ultrix a plaform seriously hampered by the fact that
DEC had not only missed catching the RISC wave but had also failed to
catch the UNIX wave as well. DEC sales people prefered selling VMS/VAX
and senior management openly denigrated UNIX while funding a product
division to develop it. Sounds mad now.
This lost DEC market share to Sun, HP, IBM and SGI who had no such
qualms about selling UNIX.
|
But (yet again) this couldn't possibly have contributed to the *decline*
of a product which had not even been introduced yet. In fact, if
anything it gave Alpha a lower starting point from which regaining lost
market share might have been easier than beginning with more of it.
| Quote: |
3. Having managed to create an ecosystem for Ultrix/MIPS DEC started
the Alpha development project in 1989 with no real intentions of
porting Ultrix to Alpha or providing any remotely sensible migration
path from Ultrix to Tru64.
|
So what? Once again, this (debatable) intent at Alpha's birth could not
possibly have caused it to *decline* - it could at worst have limited
its growth (and indeed did for years in the Unix marketplace, as I
already observed). Idiot.
| Quote: |
The Alpha introduction in 1992 with the inevitable Ultrix demise that
followed left all DEC's partners in the Ultrix/MIPS ecosystem
floundering, customers ran for the hills hotly pursued by sales teams
from Sun, IBM, HP, SGI etc waving blank order forms. (See sales
peoples commision later)
|
Since I already observed that the Unix vacillations you describe above
contributed to a slow ramp-up for Tru64 on Alpha, I'm really not sure
what your regurgitation was meant to accomplish (though it seems clear
that whatever it may have been, it had nothing to do with your
ridiculous contention that Alpha 'declined' due to lack of applications
rather than simply had an up-hill battle to fight on the Unix front due
to earlier missteps by DEC).
| Quote: |
4. DEC started out as an alternative to IBM but ended up becoming a
mini IBM without the deep pockets or market share. DEC history is
littered with strategies that apparently had nothing to do with what
customers were asking for and everything to do with what DEC though
customers wanted.
|
Actually, most of 'DEC history' (up through at least the early '80s,
which is well over half of its 40-year span) is a testament to how well
one can succeed by listening to customers and trying to give them what
they need. And the suggestion that DEC 'started out as an alternative
to IBM' simply reflects your own ignorance (or possibly incompetent
exposition): DEC began life as a module vendor, not a computer
manufacturer at all, blossomed by addressing smaller, interactive
computing markets that IBM largely ignored, and only began encroaching
significantly on IBM's territory after VAX appeared (while DEC's earlier
36-bit mainframes overlapped IBM's offerings in capabilities, they
tended to be sold with a significantly different viewpoint).
I've snipped a good deal of your subsequent babble, since it's even less
related to the subject at hand than your earlier drivel was. But I've
left your summary paragraph for the opportunity to remind you once again...
| Quote: | Every single one of these decisions was made prior to Palmer, Curly or
Carly and every single one had the effect of reducing DEC's relevance
with ISV's and direcly impacting DEC's third party software portfolio.
|
.... that events such as these which predated Alpha's debut could not
possibly have precipitated some subsequent *decline* (a 'decline' by
definition starting from some high point).
| Quote: |
The net of this and a whole load of other struggling projects such as
the 9000 series was that by 1992 when Palmer took over the reins DEC
were a shambles. They had just posted their first quarterly loss
followed by their first annual loss.
|
And Alpha was their hope for recovery - as it turned out quite a
reasonable hope (given the industry's admiration for it) until Palmer et
al. additionally screwed things up rather than set things straight.
Only Pfeiffer, during his very brief ownership of the product, attempted
to realize its potential.
| Quote: |
ISV's didn't trust them. Key partners such as Oracle who had used DEC
platforms for development and as a primary port had moved mostly to Sun
and the ISV landscape had changed from an environment where most ISV's
used DEC platforms for development to one where 60+% were using Sun.
|
Yup - nothing like a bottom-of-the-barrel starting-point to give an
architecture the opportunity to make impressive gains: Alpha had
nowhere to go but up, and indeed did so (despite being hobbled in many
respects) for most of its life prior to the Alphacide.
....
| Quote: | Had Alpha been introduced with a sensible Ultrix migration plan or even
running Ultrix as Sun had done with SunOS and SPARC and had DEC not
apparently wilfully shrunk their ISV software portfolio then it is
possible that Alpha/UNIX could have captured the 20-30% of the UNIX
market once commanded by Ultrix.
|
But as it was, it had to recover the ground solely on its merits against
significant odds. So it took a while, but (as I already noted but which
you seem eager to ignore) eventually Alpha and Tru64 proved sufficiently
compelling that they were considered the premier Unix platform from the
standpoints of both leading-edge implementation and performance (as well
as offering very competitive costs of ownership) and were growing far
faster than their larger competition right up until the Alphacide.
That's not a 'decline', Andrew: that's *growth*, and impressive (up to
30% annual) growth at that. Too bad DEC's $3 billion annual Tru64
system business in Y2K (plus the existing, though more static, $4
billion annual VMS system business) doesn't fit the myth that you're
attempting to promulgate.
And that, of course, pretty much says it all: in order to blame
something for a 'decline', one must first establish that a decline was
in fact taking place. And while its owners placed plenty of obstacles
in Alpha's path between the mid-'90s and the Alphacide, they never
managed to send it into the dive that you're so blithely assuming
occurred: it took a final act of murder to accomplish that.
- bill |
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Bob Koehler
*nix forums Guru
Joined: 25 Jul 2005
Posts: 1078
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| Posted: Thu Jul 20, 2006 9:22 pm Post subject:
Re: Alpha remembrance day
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In article <e9ofvr$onl$02$1@news.t-online.com>, Michael Kraemer <M.Kraemer@gsi.de> writes:
| Quote: |
One might be tempted to speculate what would have happened
if DEC never started alpha development. If they'd just bought half of
Mips and continued with Ultrix/MIPS, making it a more viable platform.
Could have saved them loads of $$$ which could have been used
for VAX performance boosts. This might have bought a few
more years for VAX/VMS,
during which Ultrix could have picked up some VMS features,
enough to let VMS slip into oblivion.
Certainly not a nice vision for VMS bigots, but it might
have saved DEC as a company.
Selecting a different hardware platforms to manufacture would never |
have saved DEC. They didn't learn what Billy knew: the money was
in the software.
DEC would have stayed alive only if they had kept VMS customers
happy by putting VMS on cheaper platforms instead of letting cheap
UNIX RISC and Windows Intel system steal all their VMS customers.
DEC didn't have to manufacture those platforms to make money. KO
just thought he did. |
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Michael Kraemer
*nix forums Guru Wannabe
Joined: 28 Feb 2005
Posts: 220
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| Posted: Thu Jul 20, 2006 5:54 pm Post subject:
Re: Alpha remembrance day
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Andrew schrieb:
| Quote: |
3. Having managed to create an ecosystem for Ultrix/MIPS DEC started
the Alpha development project in 1989 with no real intentions of
porting Ultrix to Alpha or providing any remotely sensible migration
path from Ultrix to Tru64.
The Alpha introduction in 1992 with the inevitable Ultrix demise that
followed left all DEC's partners in the Ultrix/MIPS ecosystem
floundering, customers ran for the hills hotly pursued by sales teams
from Sun, IBM, HP, SGI etc waving blank order forms. (See sales
peoples commision later)
Had Alpha been introduced with a sensible Ultrix migration plan or even
running Ultrix as Sun had done with SunOS and SPARC and had DEC not
apparently wilfully shrunk their ISV software portfolio then it is
possible that Alpha/UNIX could have captured the 20-30% of the UNIX
market once commanded by Ultrix.
|
One might be tempted to speculate what would have happened
if DEC never started alpha development. If they'd just bought half of
Mips and continued with Ultrix/MIPS, making it a more viable platform.
Could have saved them loads of $$$ which could have been used
for VAX performance boosts. This might have bought a few
more years for VAX/VMS,
during which Ultrix could have picked up some VMS features,
enough to let VMS slip into oblivion.
Certainly not a nice vision for VMS bigots, but it might
have saved DEC as a company. |
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Andrew
*nix forums Guru
Joined: 24 Feb 2005
Posts: 387
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| Posted: Thu Jul 20, 2006 4:45 pm Post subject:
Re: Alpha remembrance day
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Bill Todd wrote:
| Quote: | Andrew wrote:
Bill Todd wrote:
etmsreec@yahoo.co.uk wrote:
Well, that's one view.
Can
you say "lack of applications"? Can you say "lack of operating systems
to run on it"?
Can you say "incompetent blowhard?" I think David addressed that latter
chimera adequately, and given that one of said OSs was Windows
(including support of x86 application binaries) I'd say that puts the
former to rest as well (not to say that VMS and Tru64 didn't have
adequate application support in their own right, of course).
I read this post with some amusement for a number of reasons.
Unfortunately, overlooking probably the best one - for which you would
have had to have been looking in a mirror.
|
Really.
And you follow that by rolling out the same old blame it on Palmer,
Curly and Carly nonsense. How hugely ammusing.
The sad reality is that Alphas woes and eventual demise may have been
exacerbated or at least allowed to get worse by Palmer/Curly etc but
the seeds for Alphas decline were sown by DEC and their senior
management in the 80's before any of your favourite culprits were in
the frame.
1. DEC failed to catch the RISC wave first time around, not through
lack of projects but through lack of direction. Not 1 but 4 and bit
projects were started and cancelled by DEC, Titan, SAFE, HR-32, CASCADE
and finally PRISM which metamophosed out of CASCADE. This is one of a
number of examples which illustrate what a massive understatement your
"(though not always ideally-focused) " comment is.
This lost DEC market share to Sun, HP, IBM and SGI/MIPS.
2. Having belatedly realised that VAX wasn't going to survive the
onslaught of the RISC processors DEC initiated the short lived MIPS
platform running Ultrix a plaform seriously hampered by the fact that
DEC had not only missed catching the RISC wave but had also failed to
catch the UNIX wave as well. DEC sales people prefered selling VMS/VAX
and senior management openly denigrated UNIX while funding a product
division to develop it. Sounds mad now.
This lost DEC market share to Sun, HP, IBM and SGI who had no such
qualms about selling UNIX.
3. Having managed to create an ecosystem for Ultrix/MIPS DEC started
the Alpha development project in 1989 with no real intentions of
porting Ultrix to Alpha or providing any remotely sensible migration
path from Ultrix to Tru64.
The Alpha introduction in 1992 with the inevitable Ultrix demise that
followed left all DEC's partners in the Ultrix/MIPS ecosystem
floundering, customers ran for the hills hotly pursued by sales teams
from Sun, IBM, HP, SGI etc waving blank order forms. (See sales
peoples commision later)
4. DEC started out as an alternative to IBM but ended up becoming a
mini IBM without the deep pockets or market share. DEC history is
littered with strategies that apparently had nothing to do with what
customers were asking for and everything to do with what DEC though
customers wanted.
Phase V DECNet being a classic example. Perhaps it is indicative of how
bad this strategy was that the ICL were only company apart from DEC who
invested so much time and effort trying to get customers to use a
largely paper OSI standard as opposed to a completely real set of
de-facto standards.
One major utility in the UK an ICL mainframe/DEC mid tier customer
pinned their platform interoperability standards to the Phase V/OSLAN
mast only to discover that when both vendors finaly shipped working
versions (years late) that they did not interoperate.
Result more customers defect and ISV's who are asked to support DECNET
as opposed to TCP/IP by DEC because of what apears to be religious
conviction simply don't bother.
5. TCP/IP vs DECNET. Lunacy on DEC's part resulting in a number of
small companies such as TGV making good money supplying a key platform
component which DEC through mistaken religious conviction refused to
support.
6. DEC refused to pay salespeople commision cutting DEC off from the
brightest and most creative technology sales people and leading to an
exodus of skilled DEC sales reps to companies like HP, Sun, IBM etc who
were quite happy to reward large sales with large commission checks.
Sun, IBM, HP etc also rewarded ISV sales teams in the same way giving
sales teams an incentive to work vary closely with their ISV partners.
Every single one of these decisions was made prior to Palmer, Curly or
Carly and every single one had the effect of reducing DEC's relevance
with ISV's and direcly impacting DEC's third party software portfolio.
The net of this and a whole load of other struggling projects such as
the 9000 series was that by 1992 when Palmer took over the reins DEC
were a shambles. They had just posted their first quarterly loss
followed by their first annual loss.
ISV's didn't trust them. Key partners such as Oracle who had used DEC
platforms for development and as a primary port had moved mostly to Sun
and the ISV landscape had changed from an environment where most ISV's
used DEC platforms for development to one where 60+% were using Sun.
HP woed SAP and excluded VMS from the R3 platform.
New entrants to the market such as Baan, Seibel, Retek either simply
didn't bother with the new improved Digital corporation or had a
Digital platform as a second or third tier port. Digital through
indecision, poor market awareness and simple hubris had ceased to be
relevant to most ISV's.
Had Alpha been introduced with a sensible Ultrix migration plan or even
running Ultrix as Sun had done with SunOS and SPARC and had DEC not
apparently wilfully shrunk their ISV software portfolio then it is
possible that Alpha/UNIX could have captured the 20-30% of the UNIX
market once commanded by Ultrix.
NT on Alpha is and was a red herring, Digital with its track record of
losing ground in the ISV community was never going to create enough
momentum/interest to get x86/NT ISV's to port to Alpha. FX!32 far from
being the solution became part of the problem because it ment that
Digital apparently didn't need to bother. Curly's axing of the Win64
program was inevitable and without a doubt the right decision.
It is fashionable to blame Palmer, Curly etc for the demise of DEC and
Alpha but the reality is that the hole had already been dug they just
made it slightly deeper.
Why keep on rolling out the same trite challenged arguments to try and
blame the Alpha demise on more recent managment when it is clear that
they simply made an dire situation slightly worse.
Regards
Andrew Harrison
| Quote: |
1. One of the key reasons for the decline in the Alpha business was
as the previous poster quite rightly stated the lack of software.
Ah, well - taking a week off from debating with uninformed morons can be
very relaxing, but they're usually right where you left them when you
come back.
For the edification of the educable (a group which history suggests does
not number you as a member), the main reasons for the decline of Alpha were:
1. The Great Palmer Contraction - the transformation of DEC from a
forward-looking aggressive (though not always ideally-focused)
competitor to a multiple-amputee just trying to remain afloat. No one
on the inside mistook this for anything but what it was, so it seems
unlikely to have been missed by a lot of customers.
2. The infamous mid-'90s 'affinity' program (a Wes Melling Production
IIRC), which encouraged the VMS community to switch to NT on Alpha - a
great way to turn much of a loyal and robust customer base into a
combination of skittish stalwarts and disenchanted ex-users, and to
stall the growth of a leading OS without much compensating return (NT on
Alpha never having come close to taking up the resulting slack).
3. The drastic loss of VMS development momentum at the end of the '90s
(more handwriting on the wall for Alpha's primary OS for those paying
attention). When 'supporting new hardware' becomes the main attraction
of new releases rather than vigorous evolution of OS features in their
own right to keep pace with the evolving OS competition, the new trend
line is clear.
4. The Slough of Despond which Alpha entered immediately after Curly's
ascension to the throne, when both performance increases and new
releases slowed to a crawl and allowed other platforms to challenge what
had until then been the unquestioned industry performance leader. What
better way to get people wondering about the real level of commitment of
a corporation to an architecture? Well, one could have been
5. The butchering of Win64 (and Windows in general) on Alpha in August,
1999 - another Curly brain-fart which managed to call Alpha's future
into such question that the infamous "Commitment to Alpha" letter had to
be written in an attempt to quell customer fears.
6. The Unix vacillations which first embraced MIPS as the corporate
Unix platform and then haltingly switched to Alpha after that damage had
been done. It took Digital Unix sales years to recover, but recover
they eventually did: while Tru64 had only about 1/3 the market share of
AIX, or HP-UX, or Solaris as of Y2K, it was growing far faster than any
of them and threatening to overtake VMS revenues until
7. The Alphacide, of course - a fine way to kill such a resurgence.
The fact that DECpaq's Alpha system business remained one of its most
profitable hardware franchises despite those first six major handicaps,
and that its Tru64 business eventually attained robust growth, is a
testament to Alpha's (and its OSs') continuing perceived strength and
potential in the eyes of customers and their willingness to try to
leverage them. Perhaps a 'lack of applications' was some part (along
with the other problems noted above) of what kept Tru64 from growing at
*more* than the 30% annual rate it was achieving shortly prior to the
Alphacide, but it sure as hell wasn't contributing to anything
resembling a 'decline' in either absolute or market-share terms.
- bill |
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Bill Todd
*nix forums Guru
Joined: 24 Jul 2005
Posts: 408
|
| Posted: Wed Jul 19, 2006 4:45 am Post subject:
Re: Alpha remembrance day
|
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|
Andrew wrote:
| Quote: | Bill Todd wrote:
etmsreec@yahoo.co.uk wrote:
Well, that's one view.
Can
you say "lack of applications"? Can you say "lack of operating systems
to run on it"?
Can you say "incompetent blowhard?" I think David addressed that latter
chimera adequately, and given that one of said OSs was Windows
(including support of x86 application binaries) I'd say that puts the
former to rest as well (not to say that VMS and Tru64 didn't have
adequate application support in their own right, of course).
I read this post with some amusement for a number of reasons.
|
Unfortunately, overlooking probably the best one - for which you would
have had to have been looking in a mirror.
| Quote: |
1. One of the key reasons for the decline in the Alpha business was
as the previous poster quite rightly stated the lack of software.
|
Ah, well - taking a week off from debating with uninformed morons can be
very relaxing, but they're usually right where you left them when you
come back.
For the edification of the educable (a group which history suggests does
not number you as a member), the main reasons for the decline of Alpha were:
1. The Great Palmer Contraction - the transformation of DEC from a
forward-looking aggressive (though not always ideally-focused)
competitor to a multiple-amputee just trying to remain afloat. No one
on the inside mistook this for anything but what it was, so it seems
unlikely to have been missed by a lot of customers.
2. The infamous mid-'90s 'affinity' program (a Wes Melling Production
IIRC), which encouraged the VMS community to switch to NT on Alpha - a
great way to turn much of a loyal and robust customer base into a
combination of skittish stalwarts and disenchanted ex-users, and to
stall the growth of a leading OS without much compensating return (NT on
Alpha never having come close to taking up the resulting slack).
3. The drastic loss of VMS development momentum at the end of the '90s
(more handwriting on the wall for Alpha's primary OS for those paying
attention). When 'supporting new hardware' becomes the main attraction
of new releases rather than vigorous evolution of OS features in their
own right to keep pace with the evolving OS competition, the new trend
line is clear.
4. The Slough of Despond which Alpha entered immediately after Curly's
ascension to the throne, when both performance increases and new
releases slowed to a crawl and allowed other platforms to challenge what
had until then been the unquestioned industry performance leader. What
better way to get people wondering about the real level of commitment of
a corporation to an architecture? Well, one could have been
5. The butchering of Win64 (and Windows in general) on Alpha in August,
1999 - another Curly brain-fart which managed to call Alpha's future
into such question that the infamous "Commitment to Alpha" letter had to
be written in an attempt to quell customer fears.
6. The Unix vacillations which first embraced MIPS as the corporate
Unix platform and then haltingly switched to Alpha after that damage had
been done. It took Digital Unix sales years to recover, but recover
they eventually did: while Tru64 had only about 1/3 the market share of
AIX, or HP-UX, or Solaris as of Y2K, it was growing far faster than any
of them and threatening to overtake VMS revenues until
7. The Alphacide, of course - a fine way to kill such a resurgence.
The fact that DECpaq's Alpha system business remained one of its most
profitable hardware franchises despite those first six major handicaps,
and that its Tru64 business eventually attained robust growth, is a
testament to Alpha's (and its OSs') continuing perceived strength and
potential in the eyes of customers and their willingness to try to
leverage them. Perhaps a 'lack of applications' was some part (along
with the other problems noted above) of what kept Tru64 from growing at
*more* than the 30% annual rate it was achieving shortly prior to the
Alphacide, but it sure as hell wasn't contributing to anything
resembling a 'decline' in either absolute or market-share terms.
- bill |
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JF Mezei
*nix forums Guru
Joined: 21 Jul 2005
Posts: 2556
|
| Posted: Fri Jul 14, 2006 1:29 am Post subject:
Re: Alpha remembrance day
|
|
|
Keith Parris wrote:
| Quote: | What would be in a VAX 8.* release if there were one?
|
All the DCL improvements made by Guy Peleg in recent years for one
thing. (new lexicals etc).
Stuff like the ACME system services and many others that really should
be on all VMS platforms.
No, I am not asking for some fancy fibre channel clustering
interconnect. But from an application point of view, you can't use
system services that are not present on VAX and that means you have to
often re-invent the wheel in order for your app to run on all platforms. |
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Keith Parris
*nix forums Guru Wannabe
Joined: 21 Jul 2005
Posts: 145
|
| Posted: Thu Jul 13, 2006 6:53 pm Post subject:
Re: Alpha remembrance day
|
|
|
JF Mezei wrote:
| Quote: | HP has already stopped development of VMS for emulators
|
HP continues development of ECO kits for VAX.
And HP has added official support for the new 6000-series Charon-VAX
emulator.
And have you not heard about the Charon-AXP emulator? HP is certainly
still very active in the area of Alpha VMS release development.
| Quote: | despite promises for and 8.* release for the VAX architecture.
|
What would be in a VAX 8.* release if there were one?
Want your VAX to be able to be in the same cluster with 8.2 or 8.3
nodes? Already there. Already works. 7.3 VAX with 8.2 or 8.3 Alpha even
has "Warranted" level of support, not just "Migration" level. |
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Michael Kraemer
*nix forums Guru Wannabe
Joined: 28 Feb 2005
Posts: 220
|
| Posted: Thu Jul 13, 2006 8:26 am Post subject:
Re: Alpha remembrance day
|
|
|
Dave Froble schrieb:
| Quote: |
In 1992, VMS was barely capable of running on Alpha (wasn't it at
version 1.6) ?
Yeah, further thought on the subject runs along the same lines. Alpha
was just getting started in the early 1990s.
|
alpha boxes weren't ready for prime time until 1993. |
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Dave Froble
*nix forums Guru
Joined: 21 Jul 2005
Posts: 1172
|
| Posted: Thu Jul 13, 2006 6:43 am Post subject:
Re: Alpha remembrance day
|
|
|
JF Mezei wrote:
| Quote: | Dave Froble wrote:
At Decus Cincinnati 1992, I saw a Galaxy system with VMS and Linux
I don't remember the year, but before Galaxy was released, the engineers
were showing a system running as described above.
In 1992, VMS was barely capable of running on Alpha (wasn't it at
version 1.6) ?
|
Yeah, further thought on the subject runs along the same lines. Alpha
was just getting started in the early 1990s.
| Quote: | My recollection is that Galaxy was launched towards the very end of
Digital or early Compaq circa 1999. The DECUS demonstration was on an
alpha server 4100 with special firmware before the real GS machines were out.
|
Yeah, that seems more like it.
| Quote: | As I recall, Linux was chosen because it was able to behave in a
multi-instance machine with regards to respecting which devices were
assigned to it and not touching other dvices.
GS machines came when EV6 came.
|
--
David Froble Tel: 724-529-0450
Dave Froble Enterprises, Inc. E-Mail: davef@tsoft-inc.com
DFE Ultralights, Inc.
170 Grimplin Road
Vanderbilt, PA 15486 |
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JF Mezei
*nix forums Guru
Joined: 21 Jul 2005
Posts: 2556
|
| Posted: Thu Jul 13, 2006 2:36 am Post subject:
Re: Alpha remembrance day
|
|
|
Dave Froble wrote:
| Quote: | At Decus Cincinnati 1992, I saw a Galaxy system with VMS and Linux
I don't remember the year, but before Galaxy was released, the engineers
were showing a system running as described above.
|
In 1992, VMS was barely capable of running on Alpha (wasn't it at
version 1.6) ?
My recollection is that Galaxy was launched towards the very end of
Digital or early Compaq circa 1999. The DECUS demonstration was on an
alpha server 4100 with special firmware before the real GS machines were out.
As I recall, Linux was chosen because it was able to behave in a
multi-instance machine with regards to respecting which devices were
assigned to it and not touching other dvices.
GS machines came when EV6 came. |
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Tom Linden
*nix forums Guru
Joined: 06 May 2002
Posts: 841
|
| Posted: Thu Jul 13, 2006 1:10 am Post subject:
Re: Alpha remembrance day
|
|
|
On Wed, 12 Jul 2006 17:05:56 -0700, Dave Froble <davef@tsoft-inc.com>
wrote:
| Quote: | Michael Kraemer wrote:
In article <1152716151.893722.152140@p79g2000cwp.googlegroups.com>, "Ed
Wilts"
ewilts@ewilts.org> writes:
At Decus Cincinnati 1992, I saw a Galaxy system with VMS and Linux
running at the same time. Now that was cool!
huh ? galaxy in 1992 ?
And Linux ? Was barely usable on intel, let alone alpha.
I don't remember the year, but before Galaxy was released, the engineers
were showing a system running as described above.
I checked with the alpha linux guys (Thinking more about the port I saw was |
at DECUS 1995 in Washington DC)
On 12 Jul, 2006, at 13:54, Michal Jaegermann wrote:
| Quote: | On Wed, Jul 12, 2006 at 08:14:30AM -0700, Tom Linden wrote:
Can someone tell me when the first port of Linux to Digital HW ocurred?
As far as I know the first Alpha port was done in May 1994 by
Jim Paradis from DEC labs in Massachusetts. This was a 32-bit port
but pretty quickly this was replaced by a 64-bit version which
become "the one".
And I assuming that would have been Alpha.
You wonder about MIPS? I do not know what was a timeline on that.
I recall seeing a port at Decus (1994?)
|
It was done AT the DECUS Symposium, in Memphis as I recall, by Linus
himself with the help of the Unix SIG.
| Quote: | That was likely a BLADE release (64-bit) which happened later in 1994.
In fact, I even got a replica NH license plate from John
'Mad Dog' Hansen.
Well, probably Jon 'maddog' Hall (who, among other things got
DEC to send a machine to Linus) but other than that ... 
|
Back in those days, DEC was all VMS except for a couple of "oddballs" --
"maddog" being one on the inside and the rest of the Unix SIG comprising
the rest. Jon invited Linus to DECUS to talk about his project and
we all
had lots of fun drinking our way down some river on a paddle wheel, and
talking about how Unix would one day replace VMS.
Jon then managed to convince DEC marketing folks (those with the budget
dollars) to provide Linus with one of the first Alpha machines so that
he could do his porting work on that.
T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill |
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Dave Froble
*nix forums Guru
Joined: 21 Jul 2005
Posts: 1172
|
| Posted: Thu Jul 13, 2006 12:03 am Post subject:
Re: Alpha remembrance day
|
|
|
Michael Kraemer wrote:
| Quote: | In article <1152716151.893722.152140@p79g2000cwp.googlegroups.com>, "Ed Wilts"
ewilts@ewilts.org> writes:
At Decus Cincinnati 1992, I saw a Galaxy system with VMS and Linux
running at the same time. Now that was cool!
huh ? galaxy in 1992 ?
And Linux ? Was barely usable on intel, let alone alpha.
|
I don't remember the year, but before Galaxy was released, the engineers
were showing a system running as described above.
--
David Froble Tel: 724-529-0450
Dave Froble Enterprises, Inc. E-Mail: davef@tsoft-inc.com
DFE Ultralights, Inc.
170 Grimplin Road
Vanderbilt, PA 15486 |
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JF Mezei
*nix forums Guru
Joined: 21 Jul 2005
Posts: 2556
|
| Posted: Wed Jul 12, 2006 11:26 pm Post subject:
Re: Alpha remembrance day
|
|
|
etmsreec@yahoo.co.uk wrote:
| Quote: | The cost justifications for releasing 8.x on VAX are such that it isn't
commercially viable.
|
The cost of NOT doing the 8.x on VAX is HP's credibility and total lack
of respect for any future promises/commitments they make. You'd think
that they would have held that one commitment to try to rebuild the
distrust as the result of premeditated euthanasia of Alpha. |
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