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In my limited understanding two factors contributed significantly to Alpha failing. Business-wise, DEC and Ken Olesen were stuck in an old minicomputer mentalit

In my limited understanding two factors contributed significantly to Alpha failing. Business-wise, DEC and Ken Olesen were stuck in an old minicomputer mentality and wasn't sufficiently able or willing to "let it loose" and let it take over the market with DEC as the CPU supplier. Technically, Alpha development was taking longer and longer and the schedule slips got worse and worse.

kstrauser 3y ago
If the business end had kept the cash rolling in, do you think the technical side could have kept to schedule?
GrilledChips 3y ago
It wasn't the technical side that caused the schedule slips. It was constant competition with other aspects of the business, especially the VAX lineup. The VAX 9000 in particular was a $3 billion money pit that didn't make back even 25% of it's development costs and was repeatedly chosen over development of prism and later alpha. Even when it came down to the embarrassingly fast NVAX chip vs the even faster Alhpa, DEC still couldn't get the story straight and lost valuable VAX customers when they could have offered a faster VAX and an upgrade path to Alpha.
- chasil 3y ago
  I worked on a DECStation 5000/240 running Ultrix, in a student job in 1993. DEC should have bought MIPS, and ported VMS to it. Had they made that decision, they might still exist.
speed_spread 3y ago
Yeah, DEC needed to scale the Alpha down, even below PCs. A console deal could have given it a few more years and helped with chip economics.
- javitron 3y ago
  That makes no sense. Alpha was horrible in terms of power consumption.
TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
The Prism/Alpha project was one long series of disasters. Prism was delayed because the spec kept changing and the architecture had to run on VLSI and ECL - which was already a huge mistake. There was also resistance from the VAX partisans. So when samples arrived they were 2-3 years later than they should have been and MIPs had made some headway in the same space. DEC - actually Bob Supnik - decided that even though Prism was the better arch, MIPS products would bring in revenue more quickly. Which was true. But... then Prism was killed, which led to a mass walkout. The remains were resurrected a year later with some updates as Alpha. But by then it was too late for that particular market. Prism was a solid arch - some quirks, but nothing unworkable. And very, very fast. But it was a workstation-grade processor, not a mainstream PC-grade processor. DEC completely failed to understand the PC market, and it's not obvious what would have happened if Prism had survived. IMO it would have gone the way of MIPS anyway, because the workstation market was already being squeezed hard, and the PC and Mac markets had already made their choices. It might have had a good run against SPARC for a decade or so, but that would have been it.

kstrauser 3y ago

If the business end had kept the cash rolling in, do you think the technical side could have kept to schedule?

GrilledChips 3y ago

It wasn't the technical side that caused the schedule slips. It was constant competition with other aspects of the business, especially the VAX lineup. The VAX 9000 in particular was a $3 billion money pit that didn't make back even 25% of it's development costs and was repeatedly chosen over development of prism and later alpha. Even when it came down to the embarrassingly fast NVAX chip vs the even faster Alhpa, DEC still couldn't get the story straight and lost valuable VAX customers when they could have offered a faster VAX and an upgrade path to Alpha.

chasil 3y ago
I worked on a DECStation 5000/240 running Ultrix, in a student job in 1993. DEC should have bought MIPS, and ported VMS to it. Had they made that decision, they might still exist.

speed_spread 3y ago

Yeah, DEC needed to scale the Alpha down, even below PCs. A console deal could have given it a few more years and helped with chip economics.

javitron 3y ago
That makes no sense. Alpha was horrible in terms of power consumption.

TheOtherHobbes 3y ago

The Prism/Alpha project was one long series of disasters. Prism was delayed because the spec kept changing and the architecture had to run on VLSI and ECL - which was already a huge mistake. There was also resistance from the VAX partisans. So when samples arrived they were 2-3 years later than they should have been and MIPs had made some headway in the same space. DEC - actually Bob Supnik - decided that even though Prism was the better arch, MIPS products would bring in revenue more quickly. Which was true. But... then Prism was killed, which led to a mass walkout. The remains were resurrected a year later with some updates as Alpha. But by then it was too late for that particular market. Prism was a solid arch - some quirks, but nothing unworkable. And very, very fast. But it was a workstation-grade processor, not a mainstream PC-grade processor. DEC completely failed to understand the PC market, and it's not obvious what would have happened if Prism had survived. IMO it would have gone the way of MIPS anyway, because the workstation market was already being squeezed hard, and the PC and Mac markets had already made their choices. It might have had a good run against SPARC for a decade or so, but that would have been it.