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My uncle worked on the Alpha team at DEC in Maynard, MA. After retiring he found a nice opportunity consulting for Compaq and later HP. He referred to it as bei

My uncle worked on the Alpha team at DEC in Maynard, MA. After retiring he found a nice opportunity consulting for Compaq and later HP. He referred to it as being Compaqted and I think he was always saddened that the company he devoted his career to came to such an end.

NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
I just flashed on that Trash Compaqter scene in Star Wars: A New Hope.
jschveibinz 3y ago
DEC made excellent equipment and excellent software to go with it. Their FORTRAN compiler was the gold standard. But IBM and Sun were too much competition in the transition to personal workstations and UNIX. It just didn’t fit their business model of enterprise computing via mainframes and accessories. I still believe that VMS was the superior operating system. And their support was outstanding.
- midoridensha 3y ago
  >I still believe that VMS was the superior operating system. It would have been interesting if someone had built an open-source VMS-like OS instead of Linux.
  - mepian 3y ago
    Actually someone did that: https://github.com/rroart/freevms https://github.com/rroart/freevms
    - midoridensha 3y ago
      Looks like abandonware, and like it never went very far. I'm thinking more like modern Linux: originally, it was just a simple kernel and userspace (using GNU), and interesting to play with if you didn't mind a simple Unix-like system that only had text mode and couldn't really do much. Then XFree86 was added, and lots of other stuff eventually, and now it's a completely modern system running modern software, usable for all modern computing activities on modern hardware. FreeVMS never got there it seems. I'm wondering what it would be like if it had.
  - mark_round 3y ago
    If you want to get really obscure, someone has implemented a substantial amount of VMS commands and related userland stuff for classic AmigaOS! http://aminet.net/package/misc/emu/AmiVms http://aminet.net/package/misc/emu/AmiVms
- pjmlp 3y ago
  At least there is a bit of VMS spirit in Windows. In what concerns the kernel, userspace is another matter.
- vaxman 3y ago
  You got the first part right, but the second part is not correct. All IBM and Sun products, without exception, were inferior to DEC Alpha and OpenVMS at that time because all of the best wanted to work for DEC. DEC failed only due to the strategic mishandling of the company in a way not unlike what was happening in a less formal sense over at Apple. Dave Cutler broke from DEC and created Windows NT at Microsoft. A quarter million people would lose their jobs at IBM the during the market transition to Alpha-infused x86 Windows NT made possible by the killing of DEC and its quarter million employees. Sun survived a while longer because of its roll in the emerging Internet backbone, but it too died. [I remember asking an MS exec what they would do about Linux and their view, apparently for too long, was that since you had to be a stud to use it, they were content to compete with a KISS-like UX. They didLose the entire server market to Nobody In Particular with that strategy.] The only party able to make “personal Unix” economically viable tho was NeXT’s Apple and I believe we are witnessing the end of that era now as Apple moves everything to embedded (due to 3nm ARM chips fabricated by TSMC that descended from DEC’s StrongARM embedded processors, also included in the DEC settlement with Intel). Rest In Peace Ken Olsen.
  - jschveibinz 3y ago
    Thanks for the extra info!!
  - lproven 3y ago
    > DEC failed only due to the strategic mishandling of the company in a way not unlike what was happening in a less formal sense over at Apple It is interesting that there are, in hindsight, a couple of specifically identifiable missteps. DEC wasted about one billion dollars on trying to develop the VAX 9000 mainframe-class VAX, when it was already clear that RISC was the way forwards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAX_9000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAX_9000 Remarkably, it came back from this with the Alpha, which shows what it could have done. If it had instead spent that vast R&D budget on PRISM and MICA, it would have had what became NT to itself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_PRISM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_PRISM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_MICA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_MICA PRISM was cancelled; some of the tech was salvaged to make Alpha. MICA was cancelled; the project lead quit, and took his core team to MS, where they rescued OS/2 3.0 and made it into Windows NT, which has strong resemblances to the planned DEC MICA.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  VMS was the superior operating system for an era that was rapidly coming to an end. I managed a VAX cluster for a bit in the mid-80s and VMS was really better than any of the Unixes for managing a time-shared system with lots of attached terminals. But that sort of system was already heading out the door - we had early Sun workstations already. What replaced it (powerful individual user workstations connected via ethernet) was much better served by a Unix OS than VMS.

NoZebra120vClip 3y ago

I just flashed on that Trash Compaqter scene in Star Wars: A New Hope.

jschveibinz 3y ago

DEC made excellent equipment and excellent software to go with it. Their FORTRAN compiler was the gold standard. But IBM and Sun were too much competition in the transition to personal workstations and UNIX. It just didn’t fit their business model of enterprise computing via mainframes and accessories. I still believe that VMS was the superior operating system. And their support was outstanding.

midoridensha 3y ago
>I still believe that VMS was the superior operating system. It would have been interesting if someone had built an open-source VMS-like OS instead of Linux.
- mepian 3y ago
  Actually someone did that: https://github.com/rroart/freevms https://github.com/rroart/freevms
  - midoridensha 3y ago
    Looks like abandonware, and like it never went very far. I'm thinking more like modern Linux: originally, it was just a simple kernel and userspace (using GNU), and interesting to play with if you didn't mind a simple Unix-like system that only had text mode and couldn't really do much. Then XFree86 was added, and lots of other stuff eventually, and now it's a completely modern system running modern software, usable for all modern computing activities on modern hardware. FreeVMS never got there it seems. I'm wondering what it would be like if it had.
- mark_round 3y ago
  If you want to get really obscure, someone has implemented a substantial amount of VMS commands and related userland stuff for classic AmigaOS! http://aminet.net/package/misc/emu/AmiVms http://aminet.net/package/misc/emu/AmiVms
pjmlp 3y ago
At least there is a bit of VMS spirit in Windows. In what concerns the kernel, userspace is another matter.
vaxman 3y ago
You got the first part right, but the second part is not correct. All IBM and Sun products, without exception, were inferior to DEC Alpha and OpenVMS at that time because all of the best wanted to work for DEC. DEC failed only due to the strategic mishandling of the company in a way not unlike what was happening in a less formal sense over at Apple. Dave Cutler broke from DEC and created Windows NT at Microsoft. A quarter million people would lose their jobs at IBM the during the market transition to Alpha-infused x86 Windows NT made possible by the killing of DEC and its quarter million employees. Sun survived a while longer because of its roll in the emerging Internet backbone, but it too died. [I remember asking an MS exec what they would do about Linux and their view, apparently for too long, was that since you had to be a stud to use it, they were content to compete with a KISS-like UX. They didLose the entire server market to Nobody In Particular with that strategy.] The only party able to make “personal Unix” economically viable tho was NeXT’s Apple and I believe we are witnessing the end of that era now as Apple moves everything to embedded (due to 3nm ARM chips fabricated by TSMC that descended from DEC’s StrongARM embedded processors, also included in the DEC settlement with Intel). Rest In Peace Ken Olsen.
- jschveibinz 3y ago
  Thanks for the extra info!!
- lproven 3y ago
  > DEC failed only due to the strategic mishandling of the company in a way not unlike what was happening in a less formal sense over at Apple It is interesting that there are, in hindsight, a couple of specifically identifiable missteps. DEC wasted about one billion dollars on trying to develop the VAX 9000 mainframe-class VAX, when it was already clear that RISC was the way forwards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAX_9000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAX_9000 Remarkably, it came back from this with the Alpha, which shows what it could have done. If it had instead spent that vast R&D budget on PRISM and MICA, it would have had what became NT to itself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_PRISM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_PRISM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_MICA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_MICA PRISM was cancelled; some of the tech was salvaged to make Alpha. MICA was cancelled; the project lead quit, and took his core team to MS, where they rescued OS/2 3.0 and made it into Windows NT, which has strong resemblances to the planned DEC MICA.
PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
VMS was the superior operating system for an era that was rapidly coming to an end. I managed a VAX cluster for a bit in the mid-80s and VMS was really better than any of the Unixes for managing a time-shared system with lots of attached terminals. But that sort of system was already heading out the door - we had early Sun workstations already. What replaced it (powerful individual user workstations connected via ethernet) was much better served by a Unix OS than VMS.