| Not sure if this is weird revisionism or simple ignorance, but it's not remotely right (I worked for a DEC reseller back in those days and had lots of quality time with Alpha (which I miss)). Neither VMS nor OSF/1 were remotely like $30k unless you're talking about the DEC 4000/7000/10000 superminis (which ran to the US$1m range). I'd have to dig up a BoM from the old days to be exact, but the workstation license was in the US$100s/low US$1k unit price, depending on the box, and install media shipped with the box AFAIK. I have a couple of dozen copies of OSF/1 install media in a box in storage someplace so I guess I should get them on eBay ASAP. Other than the early DEC 3000 line, Alpha ran M$ WinNT on DEC hardware with the right ARC firmware (user installable, tho I seem to recall there were some NT-only products), and Linux was ported very quickly. Many of our customers never even considered VMS or OSF/1 AFAIK. We sold a lot of Alphas to run NT+SQLServer in otherwise x86 Windows shops. Third party Alpha motherboards existed but were never a big deal in the market mostly because the DEC OEM motherboards (e.g. PC164) were very good and reasonably priced (for the high end), and came in standard ATX form factors. There were, however, a lot of 3rd parties who took DEC OEM boards, put them in their own case and sold them under their own brand. Comparing Alpha and StrongARM is...weird, since they were for completely different markets. It's like saying Xeon is doomed because Atom or ARM9 is so much more power efficient. And in Alphas heyday, absolutely noone was talking about TDP outside of mobile. Alphas problem IMHO was there was never a 'low end' to capture market. Alpha was always a 'high-end PC' to 'workstation' class chip (no, Multia/21066 don't count...they were awful). In the end, AMD got 64-bit and AMD & Intel got performance competitive quickly and at the end of the day software is more important than hardware and why would end users want to have x86-64 on the low end and AXP on the high end when they can have one arch across the board. |