6 ms·

DEC's relationship with MS was fascinating DEC sued MS due to Cutler's contribution to NT. DEC thought they could sue themselves into MS's good graces. They ha

DEC's relationship with MS was fascinating DEC sued MS due to Cutler's contribution to NT. DEC thought they could sue themselves into MS's good graces. They had embroidered polo shirts saying "Strategic Relationship", and saw several employees wearing them, and the phrase was repeated often DEC couldn't figure out why Office performed worse on Alpha than x86. They sent an employee to MS, only to find MS had a single build server stashed under some desk. MS was compiling Office with -O0, obviously doing the absolute bare minimum to check a box and move on with their lives. Source: I'm a former DEC employee

hypercube33 3y ago
Fascinating. Dave over at Dave's Garage on YouTube talks about having a dec I believe -- if what you heard is true I wonder if it was the sole machine you're talking about. Maybe he can shed some light from the other side (Microsoft)
- maaarghk 3y ago
  IIRC - he mentioned that someone _else_ had a DEC machine, and actually used it as their dev box. The dev with the DEC box person developed the kernel panic code, aka the blue screen of death - and blue was chosen because that's the default screen colour when the DEC box is turned on. The idea was to reset the colour to the default before printing the kernel panic message. So while DEC NT is sort of a footnote, it did have this pretty profound influence : )
  - bitwize 3y ago
    Windows 3.x's fatal exception screens were also blue.
    - chungy 3y ago
      Indeed; I think Windows 2.0 even had it. The story might sound plausible until the holes are poked in the hypothesis.
    - ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
      So were the color schemes on many 8-bit computers of the '80s, such as Ataris and Commodores.
  - jvert 3y ago
    This is a bit of a game of telephone - NT Alpha shipped after NT 3.1 (i386 & Mips) and the port was done almost entirely by DEC. The blue screen preceded the Alpha and was really based on the color scheme from the firmware on the Mips workstation which Microsoft built internally. And, of course, the legendary SlickEdit, which was one of the original editors available on Win32. After NT 3.1, Microsoft assumed primary responsibility for NT Alpha, although there were also some great people at DECWest still involved. source: me, I'm the 'someone _else_' who owned all the Alpha stuff at Microsoft.
scruffyherder 3y ago
i'd probably blame the compiler. It's a weird mess of DEC objects being glued together to run on NT (Like the MIPS/PPC ones too). And if you wanted to make anything that for sure ran on all CPU type's you'd build /Od. Doing /O2 or /Ox was a recipe to run nowhere. The real shame is that 64bit beta compiler does such a substantially better job on the Alpha, but like everything else once everything started to gel, it suddenly imploded.
- mega_dingus 3y ago
  Compiler was definitely somewhat to blame. I was on the C/C++ team at the time, and C++ was definitely an afterthought on the existing C frontend, of a big 3-stage compiler I was on Digital UNIX so I didn't deal with VMS or Windows much. But Digital UNIX couldn't get out of their way with object file formats (COFF vs ELF and whatever else), on top of the compiler inefficiencies A recipe for disaster when the MS company employee doesn't want to do it in the first place, and you give them an artisan product that's hard to use properly
  - scruffyherder 3y ago
    damn so many potential questions, but I don't know if you can answer any as I know most people that were in those pivotal years are so cagey about it.
fredsmith219 3y ago
I was running OpenVMS on VAX machines in that era. I couldn’t figure out why DEC wanted NT, a single user operating system, for their mini computers. It made no sense to me. As an aside I had an OpenVMS gig as recently as 2020. It was fun to dust off my old DCL skills.
- icedchai 3y ago
  I have an Alpha here with OpenVMS! It's fun to play around with. VMS was the first multi-user system I had access to, way back when I was a teenager in the late 80's.
- tssva 3y ago
  > I couldn’t figure out why DEC wanted NT, a single user operating system, for their mini computers. When did you figure out that NT wasn't a single user operating system?
  - postmodest 3y ago
    NT's support for multiplexed interactive user sessions is piss-poor and has always come with a CAL restriction that was _absurd_. To this day there's no real "multiuser on consoles". (Yes yes, Citrix, rdp, Powershell Remoting, OpenSSH: compare those with X and, I guess, also SSH, and they suck.)
    - tssva 3y ago
      I'm not sure what the requirement for purchasing CALs has to do with whether an OS is multi-user or not. I have administered or been a user of interactive remote NT user session systems going back to beta testing the initial release of WinFrame in the mid 90's. Although worlds better today, I would not have called it pisspoor even then. Today RDS is much more capable than X on a unix system.
      - tiahura 3y ago
        As someone else in that space in the mid 90s I would agree that it was pretty remarkable nearly 30 years ago, especially considering the competition.
eej71 3y ago
Former VMS user here. The whole "affinity" program that DEC keep pushing just seemed confused and pointless. I think by the time DEC management realized that they had "played themselves" it was too late. And then the Itanium thing happened.
- panick21_ 3y ago
  > And then the Itanium thing happened. Its still funny to me how Itanium by its announcement basically killed or significantly delayed most other architectures only to turn out to be a dog.
  - hapless 3y ago
    Context is important. All of those competing architectures were becoming prohibitively expensive to enhance. Alpha never paid for itself, ever, the market share was too small. POWER and SPARC had multiple failed projects with enormous capital costs. MIPS hit a performance dead-end with such low market share SGI saw no way to rebuild. HPPA was bleeding HP dry. Itanium may have hastened their demise but all of these archs had the same core problems with investment returns. The writing was on the wall, and Intel was offering something people desperately wanted. (Unfortunately for everyone involved, it did not pan out.)
    - panick21_ 3y ago
      I that understand that context. But even so. POWER and SPARC were continue to be developed. And its hard to argue that either of them should have given up on their architecture. POWER is still developed. It probably made sense for Sun to stop working on SPARC eventually but not when Itanium was announced. Sun problem was just that they spend quite a bit of money, they were just never actually very good at designing processors. SGI was the most aggressive on telling everybody that Itanium would be the future. And they paid for that. They massively delayed MIPS upgrades (only to then start it again once they realized it would take a while for Itanium to come to the market). For a while after this they still made their money on MIPS and all their attempts to push Itanium pretty much fell flat. So arguable it was smart for them to plan to eventually dump MIPS but now how and when they tried to do it (Also I don't disagree that MIPS was a deadend). The deal HP got would have been fantastic if Intel had adopted PA-RISC 64-bit instead of Itanium. Given what happened HP wasn't really competitive with Sun 64-bit SMP servers and Sun made a killing on those things before the bubble. Once they bought Compaq and for a while were selling SMP servers based on Alpha. HP really should have continued to push Alpha after the bought Compaq. The already had VMS ported to Alpha and a large captured base willing to pay a little extra. They aggressively ported VMS to Itanium and thanks to the insane deal they made Intel had to manufacture them processors for a decade+. They are a large enough company and Alpha next few version had the chance to be really great, with things advanced vector extension and they had basically had the best processor team in the world. So yes, it was correct that all these companies wanted to drop their development cost, but doing so before you know really about Itanium and how good it was, that's questionable and messed up all the strategies. There was just an assumption that Itanium was gone be amazing. Granted, VLIW processors were all the hype. Sun also waste a bunch of money on VLIW processor technology in the 90s and unlike HP, they didn't it on Intel. Gordan Bell tried to hook up Alpha with Intel and make Alpha the 64-bit architecture that Intel went with. That would have been quite a different history. But for various reasons this didn't happen, and instead Intel went with HP and their next generation VLIW idea. P.S: It would have been pretty smart of Sun went in on Alpha in 1992, then they could have saved on development threw out the 90s. DEC had built up a huge fabs to handle Alpha but almost nobody bought it. They were really looking for a high value costumer and couldn't find one. Edit: > (Unfortunately for everyone involved, it did not pan out.) Well it wasn't unfortunate for everybody. Sun made quite a bit of money for a few more years with SPARC. And so did IBM with Power. I think those two companies were happy with the Itanium failure.
Damogran6 3y ago
The single best x86 computer I've ever used was a Dec Pentium 90...updated eventually to a Pentium II-300. Dec hardware was stupendous. Other systems were (obviously) faster and smaller and probably cooler and more power efficient, but their daughter card implimention of a CPU/RAM upgrade came from their obvious expertise in the Server/Scientific Workstation market with non x-86 architectures.
- rasz 3y ago
  and resulted in project failure. Grant Saviers was responsible for PC division in early nineties. Oral History of Grant Saviers, part 2 of 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Od830KDrLUU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Od830KDrLUU Oral History of Grant Saviers part 1: http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2012/08/102746014-05-01-acc.pdf http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/201... Oral History of Grant Saviers part 2: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2023/04/102795787-05-01-acc.pdf https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20... >As DEC’s Corporate Vice President of PC Systems and Peripherals from 1990 to 1992 Grant successfully restarted DEC’s PC business from a dormant state and grew revenues to $350M and break-even profitability in 18 months. @18 minute timestamp - they copied DELL strategy and did pretty good, business was growing and then DEC founder and CEO Ken Olsen decided to kill it. Grant got recruited to lead Adaptec.
  - Damogran6 3y ago
    Awww. Boss had a Digital HiNote that seemed like a pretty nifty laptop compared to the competition at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_HiNote#/media/File:DEC_HiNote_Ultra_CS450,_picture_2.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_HiNote#/media/File:DEC...
    - nxobject 3y ago
      What a pity... it seemed like "what should DEC doing in the 90s, and how is it related to DEC's historical identity?" was the question when looking back at their 90's strategy – and it seemed like thoughtfully engineered hardware, even if on a commodity architecture, is one of them. Even if it wasn't the full stack integration from semiconductor fabrication, to OS and networking, that they were used to.
panick21_ 3y ago
Yeah that relationship is strange. Seems to me they should have used that Cutler/MICA thing to make a huge amount of money and help their PC division. Not sure exactly what that 'Strategic Relationship' bought them. Seems to me all the companies making partnerships with Microsoft got shafted. Microsoft were always somehow able to use getting sued into making profitable deals for them in the long run. Because most companies didn't want to drive home the dagger, but rather get a few concessions on some kind of partnership.
sillywalk 3y ago
Not sure if this is true, but Microsoft(or Cutler) allegedly stole MICA source code and used it NT, which was part of that lawsuit. https://techmonitor.ai/technology/dec_forced_microsoft_into_alliance_with_legal_threat https://techmonitor.ai/technology/dec_forced_microsoft_into_...

hypercube33 3y ago

Fascinating. Dave over at Dave's Garage on YouTube talks about having a dec I believe -- if what you heard is true I wonder if it was the sole machine you're talking about. Maybe he can shed some light from the other side (Microsoft)

maaarghk 3y ago
IIRC - he mentioned that someone _else_ had a DEC machine, and actually used it as their dev box. The dev with the DEC box person developed the kernel panic code, aka the blue screen of death - and blue was chosen because that's the default screen colour when the DEC box is turned on. The idea was to reset the colour to the default before printing the kernel panic message. So while DEC NT is sort of a footnote, it did have this pretty profound influence : )
- bitwize 3y ago
  Windows 3.x's fatal exception screens were also blue.
  - chungy 3y ago
    Indeed; I think Windows 2.0 even had it. The story might sound plausible until the holes are poked in the hypothesis.
  - ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
    So were the color schemes on many 8-bit computers of the '80s, such as Ataris and Commodores.
- jvert 3y ago
  This is a bit of a game of telephone - NT Alpha shipped after NT 3.1 (i386 & Mips) and the port was done almost entirely by DEC. The blue screen preceded the Alpha and was really based on the color scheme from the firmware on the Mips workstation which Microsoft built internally. And, of course, the legendary SlickEdit, which was one of the original editors available on Win32. After NT 3.1, Microsoft assumed primary responsibility for NT Alpha, although there were also some great people at DECWest still involved. source: me, I'm the 'someone _else_' who owned all the Alpha stuff at Microsoft.

scruffyherder 3y ago

i'd probably blame the compiler. It's a weird mess of DEC objects being glued together to run on NT (Like the MIPS/PPC ones too). And if you wanted to make anything that for sure ran on all CPU type's you'd build /Od. Doing /O2 or /Ox was a recipe to run nowhere. The real shame is that 64bit beta compiler does such a substantially better job on the Alpha, but like everything else once everything started to gel, it suddenly imploded.

mega_dingus 3y ago
Compiler was definitely somewhat to blame. I was on the C/C++ team at the time, and C++ was definitely an afterthought on the existing C frontend, of a big 3-stage compiler I was on Digital UNIX so I didn't deal with VMS or Windows much. But Digital UNIX couldn't get out of their way with object file formats (COFF vs ELF and whatever else), on top of the compiler inefficiencies A recipe for disaster when the MS company employee doesn't want to do it in the first place, and you give them an artisan product that's hard to use properly
- scruffyherder 3y ago
  damn so many potential questions, but I don't know if you can answer any as I know most people that were in those pivotal years are so cagey about it.

fredsmith219 3y ago

I was running OpenVMS on VAX machines in that era. I couldn’t figure out why DEC wanted NT, a single user operating system, for their mini computers. It made no sense to me. As an aside I had an OpenVMS gig as recently as 2020. It was fun to dust off my old DCL skills.

icedchai 3y ago
I have an Alpha here with OpenVMS! It's fun to play around with. VMS was the first multi-user system I had access to, way back when I was a teenager in the late 80's.
tssva 3y ago
> I couldn’t figure out why DEC wanted NT, a single user operating system, for their mini computers. When did you figure out that NT wasn't a single user operating system?
- postmodest 3y ago
  NT's support for multiplexed interactive user sessions is piss-poor and has always come with a CAL restriction that was _absurd_. To this day there's no real "multiuser on consoles". (Yes yes, Citrix, rdp, Powershell Remoting, OpenSSH: compare those with X and, I guess, also SSH, and they suck.)
  - tssva 3y ago
    I'm not sure what the requirement for purchasing CALs has to do with whether an OS is multi-user or not. I have administered or been a user of interactive remote NT user session systems going back to beta testing the initial release of WinFrame in the mid 90's. Although worlds better today, I would not have called it pisspoor even then. Today RDS is much more capable than X on a unix system.
    - tiahura 3y ago
      As someone else in that space in the mid 90s I would agree that it was pretty remarkable nearly 30 years ago, especially considering the competition.

eej71 3y ago

Former VMS user here. The whole "affinity" program that DEC keep pushing just seemed confused and pointless. I think by the time DEC management realized that they had "played themselves" it was too late. And then the Itanium thing happened.

panick21_ 3y ago
> And then the Itanium thing happened. Its still funny to me how Itanium by its announcement basically killed or significantly delayed most other architectures only to turn out to be a dog.
- hapless 3y ago
  Context is important. All of those competing architectures were becoming prohibitively expensive to enhance. Alpha never paid for itself, ever, the market share was too small. POWER and SPARC had multiple failed projects with enormous capital costs. MIPS hit a performance dead-end with such low market share SGI saw no way to rebuild. HPPA was bleeding HP dry. Itanium may have hastened their demise but all of these archs had the same core problems with investment returns. The writing was on the wall, and Intel was offering something people desperately wanted. (Unfortunately for everyone involved, it did not pan out.)
  - panick21_ 3y ago
    I that understand that context. But even so. POWER and SPARC were continue to be developed. And its hard to argue that either of them should have given up on their architecture. POWER is still developed. It probably made sense for Sun to stop working on SPARC eventually but not when Itanium was announced. Sun problem was just that they spend quite a bit of money, they were just never actually very good at designing processors. SGI was the most aggressive on telling everybody that Itanium would be the future. And they paid for that. They massively delayed MIPS upgrades (only to then start it again once they realized it would take a while for Itanium to come to the market). For a while after this they still made their money on MIPS and all their attempts to push Itanium pretty much fell flat. So arguable it was smart for them to plan to eventually dump MIPS but now how and when they tried to do it (Also I don't disagree that MIPS was a deadend). The deal HP got would have been fantastic if Intel had adopted PA-RISC 64-bit instead of Itanium. Given what happened HP wasn't really competitive with Sun 64-bit SMP servers and Sun made a killing on those things before the bubble. Once they bought Compaq and for a while were selling SMP servers based on Alpha. HP really should have continued to push Alpha after the bought Compaq. The already had VMS ported to Alpha and a large captured base willing to pay a little extra. They aggressively ported VMS to Itanium and thanks to the insane deal they made Intel had to manufacture them processors for a decade+. They are a large enough company and Alpha next few version had the chance to be really great, with things advanced vector extension and they had basically had the best processor team in the world. So yes, it was correct that all these companies wanted to drop their development cost, but doing so before you know really about Itanium and how good it was, that's questionable and messed up all the strategies. There was just an assumption that Itanium was gone be amazing. Granted, VLIW processors were all the hype. Sun also waste a bunch of money on VLIW processor technology in the 90s and unlike HP, they didn't it on Intel. Gordan Bell tried to hook up Alpha with Intel and make Alpha the 64-bit architecture that Intel went with. That would have been quite a different history. But for various reasons this didn't happen, and instead Intel went with HP and their next generation VLIW idea. P.S: It would have been pretty smart of Sun went in on Alpha in 1992, then they could have saved on development threw out the 90s. DEC had built up a huge fabs to handle Alpha but almost nobody bought it. They were really looking for a high value costumer and couldn't find one. Edit: > (Unfortunately for everyone involved, it did not pan out.) Well it wasn't unfortunate for everybody. Sun made quite a bit of money for a few more years with SPARC. And so did IBM with Power. I think those two companies were happy with the Itanium failure.

Damogran6 3y ago

The single best x86 computer I've ever used was a Dec Pentium 90...updated eventually to a Pentium II-300. Dec hardware was stupendous. Other systems were (obviously) faster and smaller and probably cooler and more power efficient, but their daughter card implimention of a CPU/RAM upgrade came from their obvious expertise in the Server/Scientific Workstation market with non x-86 architectures.

rasz 3y ago
and resulted in project failure. Grant Saviers was responsible for PC division in early nineties. Oral History of Grant Saviers, part 2 of 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Od830KDrLUU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Od830KDrLUU Oral History of Grant Saviers part 1: http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2012/08/102746014-05-01-acc.pdf http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/201... Oral History of Grant Saviers part 2: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2023/04/102795787-05-01-acc.pdf https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20... >As DEC’s Corporate Vice President of PC Systems and Peripherals from 1990 to 1992 Grant successfully restarted DEC’s PC business from a dormant state and grew revenues to $350M and break-even profitability in 18 months. @18 minute timestamp - they copied DELL strategy and did pretty good, business was growing and then DEC founder and CEO Ken Olsen decided to kill it. Grant got recruited to lead Adaptec.
- Damogran6 3y ago
  Awww. Boss had a Digital HiNote that seemed like a pretty nifty laptop compared to the competition at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_HiNote#/media/File:DEC_HiNote_Ultra_CS450,_picture_2.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_HiNote#/media/File:DEC...
  - nxobject 3y ago
    What a pity... it seemed like "what should DEC doing in the 90s, and how is it related to DEC's historical identity?" was the question when looking back at their 90's strategy – and it seemed like thoughtfully engineered hardware, even if on a commodity architecture, is one of them. Even if it wasn't the full stack integration from semiconductor fabrication, to OS and networking, that they were used to.

panick21_ 3y ago

Yeah that relationship is strange. Seems to me they should have used that Cutler/MICA thing to make a huge amount of money and help their PC division. Not sure exactly what that 'Strategic Relationship' bought them. Seems to me all the companies making partnerships with Microsoft got shafted. Microsoft were always somehow able to use getting sued into making profitable deals for them in the long run. Because most companies didn't want to drive home the dagger, but rather get a few concessions on some kind of partnership.

sillywalk 3y ago

Not sure if this is true, but Microsoft(or Cutler) allegedly stole MICA source code and used it NT, which was part of that lawsuit. https://techmonitor.ai/technology/dec_forced_microsoft_into_alliance_with_legal_threat https://techmonitor.ai/technology/dec_forced_microsoft_into_...