[vaxman]

Read his site and want to point out for the younglings that even as far back as 1984, DEC was showing slides at DECUS that projected 1 BIPS performance from future models. They went into intricate detail explaining how their multi-stage pipelining and other cooling techniques would scale.

Then Sun Microsystems declared bankruptcy so it could pivot off of 680x0 tech (that was no match for the VAX) and onto SPARC. (Trump’s companies and many others used the same technique.) That prompted DEC to begin developing what would become Alpha whose architecture was reportedly stolen by Intel while being shopped to them as a potential second source supplier, then misappropriated into Pentium Pro/II/III/IV models which all but killed the market for minicomputers from DEC (there was a legal settlement that resulted in Intel buying DEC’s Hudson chip FAB business unit which also produced the StrongARM chip which took hold of the nascent smartphone and Chromebook-like industries, but of course Intel sold it off because Microsoft wasn’t interested in that BS.) Intel then killed off their own amazing 432-chip (a potential VAX killer) and formally released the Alpha tech from DEC inside of Itanium, which sort of flopped around like a dying fish as the whole PC-monopoly and security nightmare began.

The DEC operating system, carefully evolved by scientists over 30 years, was first ported to Alpha, then Itanium before DEC itself wound up merged with its historic competitors that had their own 30 year old proprietary software and DEC’s system did not survive. They kept their foot on the throat of anyone who would port it to the Pentium chips long enough to make sure it never took off. Seeing it come back on rPi (which is a descendant of StrongARM) is so ironic. Maybe we could get all the crazies out there still working on Plan9 and other obscure systems to merge Android infrastructure with VAX/VMS and...

[dboreham]

There's quite a bit of fantasy in this post. 432 "amazing". Hmm. Perhaps you're confusing Itanium being related to HP PA which in turn was related to Apollo risc?

[vaxman]

“fantasy”? I lived it and I’m likely at least a decade or more younger than you if you did too.

Yes, I read a/the hardcover book on 432 and was really impressed. There was a slow build for that architecture because it was so different than x86.

Itanium is as I said and the downvote, plus raising the competing architecture that crushed DEC into oblivion once Carly “That Face” Fiorina bought Compaq/DEC and you guys finally got your paws on it and your insult (“fantasy”) tells me where you are coming from. I only hope you are retired (either in Microsoft or on Social Security )

[jecel]

The iAPX432 was released in 1981 but by 1984 Intel had already given up on it, morphing it into the Intel 960. That was a long time before the DEC Alpha came out. The Alpha had already been killed in practice by the time the Itanium project actually started: 1998.

[vaxman]

I never said Alpha had something to do with 432. (If anything, it had more to do with the VAX and DG MV/8000.) It's demise (and the 960) had something to do with Alpha though.

And uhgain...Itanium was the legit successor to Alpha, Pentium Pro/II/III/IV were the illegit knock-offs that made that horrific turn of events possible.

[pfdietz]

> Then Sun Microsystems declared bankruptcy so it could pivot off of 680x0 tech (that was no match for the VAX) and onto SPARC.

What? Is that a figurative use of the word "bankruptcy"?

[vaxman]

No, it was actual bankruptcy (Chapter 11, Holloween 1985..pre IPO). SPARC really hurt DEC. Until that point none of the half-dozen Unix-based platforms could offer enough performance to offset the disadvantage of its architecture and relative lack of standards.

[pfdietz]

Huh. I cannot find any information about that on the net. Sun had positive net revenue in both 1985 and 1986, so this seems very weird.

[vaxman]

Well, bear in mind that as a DECie, I was being fed information by DEC. The story on EasyNet (a social media system for 200,000 workers in DEC's famed "matrix management") was that Reorganization allowed them to finish SPARC and that led to a highly successful IPO but by 1989 they were floundering due to the difficult customer transition process (from 680x0 to SPARC). But also worth noting, in October 1987, the stock market had its first significant "correction" since 1929 which really hurt DEC stock that, at that time, held the same position in portfolios that AAPL does today and it never recovered. The primary beneficiaries of DEC's collapse were the PC manufacturers building Windows NT "servers". SUN survived with DEC's old Engineering/Science/Academia/FinTech customers and eventually found its way back when the Internet took off (only to later be beaten by PC manufacturers allowing LINUX installs).

[icedchai]

I think something is off. Sun IPO'd in 1986. The first SparcStation wasn't released until 1989. I can't find any evidence they ever declared bankruptcy of any sort...

[vaxman]

Yes, the SPARC processor went under development in 1984ish, IPO in 1986, market "correction worst since 1928" in 1987, but SPARCstation 1, the first commercial system with SPARC, was not released until 1989 and SUN drifted sideways because of the difficult transition to RISC (and System V?) from CISC (and BSD4.2) until the Internet taking-off (due to Vincent Cerf releasing async-PPP as Microsoft RAS) generated massive server demand beginning around 1996 (followed by dot-com bubble, crash, nuclear winter, rise of free software particularly LINUX and ultimately death of SUN). Drifting sideways after 1989 on the remains of DEC's high-end business (with DEC's low-end aka "departmental" business going to the PC's running Windows NT "server") was preferable to what happened to virtually every other major computer manufacturer of that era (including IBM --those monsters simply laid off hundreds of thousands of Americans, sold off their PC assets to ChYna and opened massive plants in Bangalore to write code in SUN's Java set-top-box language).

[pfdietz]

Yeah, I'm going to call shenanigans on that claim. I think you were fed misinformation. Sun suffered just one quarter of loss until 1999: that was a $20.3 M loss on $431 M in revenue for one quarter in 1989. I suspect the turbulence Sun experienced then was blown wildly out of proportion in the EasyNet echo chamber.

[vaxman]

Possible but DEC wasn't known for that level of BS --I think some of the confusion may have come from the fact that SUN acquired a storage vendor in Colorado during that time that had massive revenues but was drowning in debt and that company did file bankruptcy on Holloween, 1985 --perhaps not because SUN needed a storage vendor in Colorado, but because they got the the cash infusion without the debt. Can't really be sure what the competitive marketing folks were referring to, just be certain that I am accurately recalling the summary of what was on Easynet in those dark years. I am a polaroid head and held the top technical position over thousands of engineers as a teen...for me, the attention to legal/business/politics came later in life.