RE: 9000 --All of the non-Alpha VAXes from the 8000 onwards were to support cash flow during the planned transition to what would become Alpha. I should say tha

RE: 9000 --All of the non-Alpha VAXes from the 8000 onwards were to support cash flow during the planned transition to what would become Alpha. I should say that is a generalization as I'm totally certain some non-Alpha systems were still needed for solutions that utilized custom hardware or support. RE: "weird capitalization" - "Board" was capitalized because I was referencing a specific board of directors. "Blue blood" was not capitalized because I was characterizing the members of said board. The relevance of making that characterization was to emphasize that those board members were under INTENSE pressure from their peers/ancestors/descendants to achieve at least the level of success that they were all observing coming from Redmond, especially the younger members of their dynasties. I think they were fine with a Pinto-driving living legend like Ken and his armada of actual geniuses (not Geniuses) until Redmond got going. Then FOMO didn't even begin to describe what they were experiencing as "some geeky guy" made hundreds of billions of dollars and became the wealthiest man on Earth, right under their noses. (They've ensured that can never happen again, but I get my account here Closed if I tell how they did it.) RE: 286/386/486 was the end of the original Intel X86 line (without Alpha-infused technology). They were in various stages of being knocked off by Chinese companies like VIA. Microsoft was porting NT away from that ISA (onto MIPS). Pentium came out of left field and scaled like crazy. I'm not sure if/when it's fair to stop attributing Alpha technology to the success of X86. RE: "killing it" --NT on even a Pentium III was no match for a VAXcluster. A network of NT boxes interconnected by "field technicians" into a LAN was. (A "field technician" of that era would have trouble interconnecting VAXes --but they had more than ample capability to setup NetWare and NETBIOS networks in the most unusual ways and places.) In this way, it can be said that WindowsNT (and the budget it gained from legacy NetWare installations) literally connected the VAX to death, not unlike what VAX had been doing to IBM mainframes (and their clones) for sometime. > weird un-clarified Well, you are a good person because when you sense a lack of context, you don't instantly hit downvote (unlike most on Hacker News).