4 ms·

I ran across this paper on the subject a couple of months ago: https://www.sigcis.org/files/Goodwin_paper.pdf https://www.sigcis.org/files/Goodwin_paper.pdf A

I ran across this paper on the subject a couple of months ago: https://www.sigcis.org/files/Goodwin_paper.pdf https://www.sigcis.org/files/Goodwin_paper.pdf As you'd expect for the failure of such a large company, it wasn't just one thing that went wrong. Among the reasons were: a too-rapid expansion into the commercial area, leading to huge redundancy costs when that had to be scaled back; management flailing about with competing projects; failures to exploit the PC and Unix markets; and selling off profitable arms to finance unprofitable ones. As an example of the flailing, they cancelled their PRISM project for a new RISC architecture and OS (the immediate result of which was Cutler and others leaving for Microsoft), yet developed RISC later with Alpha. But they'd also been doing that kind of thing through the successful years. The last PDP-10 was cancelled when there was still a market for them, to the extent that two other companies made money by supplying PDP-10–compatibles that DEC wouldn't. I recall a DECUS conference from around the VMS 4.0 era in which we were told the cluster lock manager + RDB was going to eventually replace the FILES-11 file system; the lock manager was delivered, but RDB eventually sold off. One anecdote from the linked paper is particularly sad. John Sculley, of Apple, met with Olsen in 1991 to talk about using Alpha in Macs, when those were still 68k-based. But Olsen wanted to concentrate on VAX and wouldn't do it, so Apple went with PowerPC instead. The anecdote is referenced as being in an email from Sculley to the paper's author.

KMag 6y ago
It's a real shame the Alpha didn't survive. They were pretty brutal about cutting out anything unnecessary and most things that were difficult for a compiler to take advantage of. The earliest versions couldn't load or store singe bytes, and the compiler would insert the necessary bit manipulation to do single byte manipulations using 32-bit or 64-bit loads and stores. Apparently, anyone who wanted to add a new instruction needed to show a good business use case with simulated benchmark. The Alpha's memory model is notoriously low on guarantees, to give the processor maximal opportunities to re-order memory operations. It's the lowest-common-denominator that influenced what guarantees are made in the Java memory model. Of course, Java could have gone with a stronger memory model and forced Alpha implementations of the JVM to insert a lot more memory fence instructions. One under-appreciated aspect of the Alpha was that its firmware (PALCode) was essentially a hypervisor that only supported one guest. The True64 or VMS Kernel actually made upcalls to the PALCode to manipulate page tables, etc. I think it would have transitioned well into the hypervisor world, needing minimal modification to the PALCode, and all OS kernels on Alpha were already para-virtualized to use PALCode upcalls, so there would be very little overhead in running those kernels on a multi-guest hypervisor. If I remember correctly, DEC also invented/patented hyperthreading, and successfully sued Intel over it. Though, as I remember, the settlement conditions forced Intel to buy the StrongARM business off of DEC, which I think was another case of selling off a profitable business to get operating cash for unprofitable businesses. It's the business equivalent of payday loans.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
bjnord 6y ago
I started my history with computers on the PDP 11/40 at my Dad's university. Years later when my company was writing Unix software and we were porting to all the major vendors, DEC loaned us an Alpha workstation so we could port to OSF/1. That machine was blindingly fast, way way better than any of the Sun, HP, IBM, etc. hardware we had in the office. It quickly became my desktop because it came with a gorgeous monitor. I strung out the loan as long as I could and was sad when it had to leave. James Gosling spoke at our developer conference around that time, and talked about the Alpha design team (who got to create this fast RISC processor without worrying about the "embarrassingly large" backward compatibility footprint the modern x86 chips were saddled with), and how great the Alpha was as a platform for Java. DEC and Sun were my two favorite tech companies; I'm glad I got to use their products when they were at their height.

KMag 6y ago

It's a real shame the Alpha didn't survive. They were pretty brutal about cutting out anything unnecessary and most things that were difficult for a compiler to take advantage of. The earliest versions couldn't load or store singe bytes, and the compiler would insert the necessary bit manipulation to do single byte manipulations using 32-bit or 64-bit loads and stores. Apparently, anyone who wanted to add a new instruction needed to show a good business use case with simulated benchmark. The Alpha's memory model is notoriously low on guarantees, to give the processor maximal opportunities to re-order memory operations. It's the lowest-common-denominator that influenced what guarantees are made in the Java memory model. Of course, Java could have gone with a stronger memory model and forced Alpha implementations of the JVM to insert a lot more memory fence instructions. One under-appreciated aspect of the Alpha was that its firmware (PALCode) was essentially a hypervisor that only supported one guest. The True64 or VMS Kernel actually made upcalls to the PALCode to manipulate page tables, etc. I think it would have transitioned well into the hypervisor world, needing minimal modification to the PALCode, and all OS kernels on Alpha were already para-virtualized to use PALCode upcalls, so there would be very little overhead in running those kernels on a multi-guest hypervisor. If I remember correctly, DEC also invented/patented hyperthreading, and successfully sued Intel over it. Though, as I remember, the settlement conditions forced Intel to buy the StrongARM business off of DEC, which I think was another case of selling off a profitable business to get operating cash for unprofitable businesses. It's the business equivalent of payday loans.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

bjnord 6y ago

I started my history with computers on the PDP 11/40 at my Dad's university. Years later when my company was writing Unix software and we were porting to all the major vendors, DEC loaned us an Alpha workstation so we could port to OSF/1. That machine was blindingly fast, way way better than any of the Sun, HP, IBM, etc. hardware we had in the office. It quickly became my desktop because it came with a gorgeous monitor. I strung out the loan as long as I could and was sad when it had to leave. James Gosling spoke at our developer conference around that time, and talked about the Alpha design team (who got to create this fast RISC processor without worrying about the "embarrassingly large" backward compatibility footprint the modern x86 chips were saddled with), and how great the Alpha was as a platform for Java. DEC and Sun were my two favorite tech companies; I'm glad I got to use their products when they were at their height.