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DEC was part of HP at that point, so it was the HP leadership that made the decision to ditch Alpha.
by psandor 5y ago
DEC was part of HP at that point, so it was the HP leadership that made the decision to ditch Alpha.
- Paianni 5y agoCompaq bought DEC and killed Alpha before both got folded into HP.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y agoAlpha was the reason DEC was for sale. It was a very cool speedy architecture, but it took too long to emerge from the DEC management swamp. Bitsavers has a series of memos showing how the Alpha predecessor Prism went down in flames when DEC decided to quick-fix its technology hole with MIPS. Alpha was a kind of illicit skunk works leftover from that failed project. If DEC had pushed it out the door a couple of years earlier - not likely, but possible with a push - it might have eaten the rest of the industry.
- jabl 5y agoI suspect that whatever the virtues of the Alpha architecture [1], DEC simply didn't have the muscle to stay in the game with exponentially increasing R&D costs. [1] And it's not like Alpha was some shining beauty of ISA design either. Early versions lacking sub-word load/store, the absolutely crazy memory consistency model, ...