4 ms·

My school had at least a thousand DEC MIPS/Ultra/pmax workstations in 1993. When they announced they were killing the line we bought thousands of Suns and HP-U

My school had at least a thousand DEC MIPS/Ultra/pmax workstations in 1993. When they announced they were killing the line we bought thousands of Suns and HP-UX machines. I remember seeing 2 Alpha machines in a special computer lab and I could log in but none of our engineering software ran on it. Maybe in a few years but I graduated by then.

panick21_ 3y ago
This is kind of the crux of the issue. Alpha came out with great performance (but pretty expensive) in general but some issues related to performance of Unix and strings. They killed the MIPS/Ultrix line but gave people no path to move to Alpha/Ultrix. Ultrix was never ported to Alpha. Only Alpha/OSF1 so a fundamental hardware and software shift. Its easier to go to SPARC/SunOS or SPARC/Solaris and they had lots of machines from cheaper to more expensive. For schools they often bought the slightly cheaper workstations. Alpha 64bit wasn't really a hugely important feature that point in time. This again where starting with 32-bit PRISM would have been a better move. At the same time, their VAX line was still not Alpha, they bet on NVAX for quite a long time. So the VMS crowed didn't need to switch to Alpha. DEC wanted to make Alpha an industry standard but then they had little interest in working with Apple to get volume. The big workstation/server vendors had their own ISAs and since DEC also wanted to compete in those market simply adopting a new standard from DEC was just not gone happen. And as a new standard for lower priced machines it just not gone happen, 64-bit was totally wrong for markets like that and you would need Windows/Intel to even have a shot at that. It was also not good for embedded so DEC went with StrongARM. DEC just made really bad strategy choices starting in late 1988s. By 1986 they had started the VAX9000 project. That might be fine but by 1988 you have to realize that project was dead and simply kill it, and rush out VAX based on PRISM with nice high quality VMS port.

panick21_ 3y ago

This is kind of the crux of the issue. Alpha came out with great performance (but pretty expensive) in general but some issues related to performance of Unix and strings. They killed the MIPS/Ultrix line but gave people no path to move to Alpha/Ultrix. Ultrix was never ported to Alpha. Only Alpha/OSF1 so a fundamental hardware and software shift. Its easier to go to SPARC/SunOS or SPARC/Solaris and they had lots of machines from cheaper to more expensive. For schools they often bought the slightly cheaper workstations. Alpha 64bit wasn't really a hugely important feature that point in time. This again where starting with 32-bit PRISM would have been a better move. At the same time, their VAX line was still not Alpha, they bet on NVAX for quite a long time. So the VMS crowed didn't need to switch to Alpha. DEC wanted to make Alpha an industry standard but then they had little interest in working with Apple to get volume. The big workstation/server vendors had their own ISAs and since DEC also wanted to compete in those market simply adopting a new standard from DEC was just not gone happen. And as a new standard for lower priced machines it just not gone happen, 64-bit was totally wrong for markets like that and you would need Windows/Intel to even have a shot at that. It was also not good for embedded so DEC went with StrongARM. DEC just made really bad strategy choices starting in late 1988s. By 1986 they had started the VAX9000 project. That might be fine but by 1988 you have to realize that project was dead and simply kill it, and rush out VAX based on PRISM with nice high quality VMS port.