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Maybe relevant to this discussion, "A Historical Look at the VAX": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27527140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27527140
by saxonww 4y ago
Maybe relevant to this discussion, "A Historical Look at the VAX":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27527140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27527140
And also "The VAX":
https://yarchive.net/comp/vax.html https://yarchive.net/comp/vax.html
I don't really understand all of this, but the high level gist is that the VAX ISA was almost out of runway; it wasn't entirely that DEC made bad choices but also that they couldn't take VAX where it would need to go to remain competitive anyway.
- panick21_ 4y agoI don't know, if you have an Alpha and you simply write a fast hardware virtualization layer I don't see why you couldn't sell those machines to the exact same costumers you did before. Now Alpha was a bit late but the same strategy could have been adopted earlier. IBM has the same costumers and has virtual layer onto of virtual layer to support technology from the 60s. You then also port the OS to some RISC system and x86 and attempt to get new costumers using VMS on those system architectures.
- saxonww 4y agoThat's what DEC did, they ported VMS to Alpha. No virtualization necessary. OpenVMS is still out there and used by people, but VAX is dead. As is DEC :/.