5 ms·

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 ti

by 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.
- mananaysiempre 3y ago
  > If it had instead spent that vast R&D budget on PRISM and MICA, it would have had what became NT to itself. It’s not clear to me whether they would have gotten as much out of it as Microsoft did out of NT, though. The marketing of NT4 (at least) reached down to fairly small server setups (even if wasn’t particularly popular on the workstation side—hardware requirements?), what with the BackOffice branding and everything, and Microsoft wouldn’t have blown you off if you just wanted to give them $5k for a few licenses. As I’m reading it, DEC’s mindset couldn’t really support this kind of strategy. Also, nearly nobody programs against the NT API as opposed to the Win32 API and things built on top of it. I can’t tell what the intention of MICA was—keep the nice native API essentially private and only expose the VMS “personality” running on top of it, like Microsoft did, or something else?
  - lproven 3y ago
    > It’s not clear to me whether they would have gotten as much out of it as Microsoft did out of NT, though. Oh, absolutely agreed. MS did very well and the core of NT is a superb product. But merely having a superb product is not enough. It's hard to see how big and how influential DEC was today. Now, young techies assume that an 8-bit byte is a universal thing, that it's natural and obvious that computers just obviously use binary and that means word lengths that are powers of 2... Whereas DEC sold vastly successful minicomputers with word lengths of 12, 18, 24 and 36 bits as well as 8-bit and 16-bit machines! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmed_Data_Processor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmed_Data_Processor And those machines inspired the designs and the command lines of CP/M and MS-DOS, and as such, directly and profoundly influenced the PC industry. These were not niche machines, they were the mainstream that led to the standard OS that made Intel a success with the 8080, and that in turn led to the Zilog Z80 that spawned many multi-million-selling 1980s home computers... but it also led to the PC. DEC OS/8 (and its big sibling TOPS-10) are what led to not only the CP/M and DOS command lines, but also things like 3-letter file extensions (after a dot). Every .TXT and .JPG and .HTM file exists because of the PDP-8. https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/81341.html https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/81341.html And that was a 12-bit machine, not 8-bit, or 16-bit like the PDP-11, the machine that led to the 32-bit VAX, whose VMS is the direct ancestor of MICA and NT. UNIX was developed for the PDP-7, an 18-bit machine. The machines and their OSes are nearly forgotten now, and DEC is a footnote, but the weird thing is that both the CP/M–MS-DOS–OS/2–Windows–Windows NT family evolved from DEC OSes on DEC machines, but also the Unix family was designed and implemented by a 3rd party on DEC hardware, and then ported to different DEC hardware. The two big rival lines of OSes today both can be traced back to the same company's products. Unix and microcomputers are what killed DEC... It foolishly bet against them, it bet on big iron and tried to turn its most successful minicomputer into a mainframe. But even despite that, and wasting a mind-blowing amount of money, it still came back and produced the first 64-bit RISC chip, and the first 64-bit Unix to run on it, and it got a native version of the industry-dominating OS which grew out of its own cancelled project. And that chip was also the target of the first ever port of Linux to something non-x86. It was an incredible comeback. It's tragic that ultimately it wasn't enough.

by vaxman 3y ago

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.

mananaysiempre 3y ago
> If it had instead spent that vast R&D budget on PRISM and MICA, it would have had what became NT to itself. It’s not clear to me whether they would have gotten as much out of it as Microsoft did out of NT, though. The marketing of NT4 (at least) reached down to fairly small server setups (even if wasn’t particularly popular on the workstation side—hardware requirements?), what with the BackOffice branding and everything, and Microsoft wouldn’t have blown you off if you just wanted to give them $5k for a few licenses. As I’m reading it, DEC’s mindset couldn’t really support this kind of strategy. Also, nearly nobody programs against the NT API as opposed to the Win32 API and things built on top of it. I can’t tell what the intention of MICA was—keep the nice native API essentially private and only expose the VMS “personality” running on top of it, like Microsoft did, or something else?
- lproven 3y ago
  > It’s not clear to me whether they would have gotten as much out of it as Microsoft did out of NT, though. Oh, absolutely agreed. MS did very well and the core of NT is a superb product. But merely having a superb product is not enough. It's hard to see how big and how influential DEC was today. Now, young techies assume that an 8-bit byte is a universal thing, that it's natural and obvious that computers just obviously use binary and that means word lengths that are powers of 2... Whereas DEC sold vastly successful minicomputers with word lengths of 12, 18, 24 and 36 bits as well as 8-bit and 16-bit machines! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmed_Data_Processor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmed_Data_Processor And those machines inspired the designs and the command lines of CP/M and MS-DOS, and as such, directly and profoundly influenced the PC industry. These were not niche machines, they were the mainstream that led to the standard OS that made Intel a success with the 8080, and that in turn led to the Zilog Z80 that spawned many multi-million-selling 1980s home computers... but it also led to the PC. DEC OS/8 (and its big sibling TOPS-10) are what led to not only the CP/M and DOS command lines, but also things like 3-letter file extensions (after a dot). Every .TXT and .JPG and .HTM file exists because of the PDP-8. https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/81341.html https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/81341.html And that was a 12-bit machine, not 8-bit, or 16-bit like the PDP-11, the machine that led to the 32-bit VAX, whose VMS is the direct ancestor of MICA and NT. UNIX was developed for the PDP-7, an 18-bit machine. The machines and their OSes are nearly forgotten now, and DEC is a footnote, but the weird thing is that both the CP/M–MS-DOS–OS/2–Windows–Windows NT family evolved from DEC OSes on DEC machines, but also the Unix family was designed and implemented by a 3rd party on DEC hardware, and then ported to different DEC hardware. The two big rival lines of OSes today both can be traced back to the same company's products. Unix and microcomputers are what killed DEC... It foolishly bet against them, it bet on big iron and tried to turn its most successful minicomputer into a mainframe. But even despite that, and wasting a mind-blowing amount of money, it still came back and produced the first 64-bit RISC chip, and the first 64-bit Unix to run on it, and it got a native version of the industry-dominating OS which grew out of its own cancelled project. And that chip was also the target of the first ever port of Linux to something non-x86. It was an incredible comeback. It's tragic that ultimately it wasn't enough.