Gary -- A little story, from my perspective on the Alpha. - during the late '70s and early '80s DEC could do no wrong. The schools bought the PDP series computers because they could. The student engineers trained on them 'cause they had to. When they went into the work place they wanted PDP. The operating system was identical from top to bottom of the line. If you trained on one, you could switch to any of the others without problems. DEC was MINTING money! Then came UNIX. and lots of companies jumped onto the system. It became the training system of choice, and was what the newbies knew, so DEC designed the ALPHA(in '92) and THEIR version of UNIX to run on it. Lots of other versions ran on other machines, but the two most prevelant were ATT and BSD. (ATT invented, but BSD had DOD money to improve) DEC was left in the lurch, and stayed in it too long. Their CPU was the best, but their systems(and software) couldn't compete. MIT was saying 'here is free software to go with your brandy new box'.
SUNW was saying 'the network is the solution', and they were correct(IMO). HP was saying 'MIPS' are the solution, and they succeeded, for a while(I got tangled up in that mess, and while they had the MIPS, they also didn't have the OS under control, IMO).
In the present, there is a huge demand for cheap processing power. When the IP managers look at the prices and availability of X86 vs UNIX alternative software packages, they just don't compare!
Thus, the push toward X86 cpus. The K7 looks to incorporate lots of the DEC thinking(as does the P-line from INTC) with X86 instruction set. Will it(K7) succeed? - I think so, but don't know. INTC has one heck of a lot of manufacturing prowess, but I think their design abilities have gone down hill since '96.
The end.
tgptndr, off the cuff |
