Re: Alpha remembrance day


JF Mezei wrote:
Andrew wrote:
"Competing with Wintel" why would you think that Alpha was ever going
to manage that ? It was never going to hit the price points required to
compete with x86. The cheapest Alpha PC's cost $1500

Exactly. Digital had a policy of not selling Alpha PCs competitively
because of a "we can't compete with outselves" situation when Digital
setup its own Wintel division. Where there is a will, there is a way,
and Digital could have made cheap alpha-based PCs if it had wanted to.
(ok, perhaps not as cheap as a Dell machine, but definitely competitive
in the mid to high end desktop PC).

I wasn't talking about AlphaPC's from Digital $1500 was for a 3rd party
AlphaPC.
Of course it is possible that AlphaPC's could have been as cheap as
Dells etc but it is unlikely.

The base config DECpc 150 AXP announced at Comdex cost $6,795 for that
you got 16 MB RAM, SVGA colour, 245 MB disk and a 3.5 inch floppy and a
keyboard.

This was the first Alpha based PC, by 1997 prices had come down to
$1500 but this was still way more than a commodity PC cost.


Hang on Palmer started talking to Compaq in 1996 and some time after
Palmer aledgedly started running down the FAB because Compaq didn't
want it.

Are you now suggesting that Palmer somehow guessed that Compaq would
not want the FAB and started running it down before even beginning
negociations with Compaq.


Palmer did not guess. He was told by Pfeiffer. On the Compaq announced
it was buying Digital, Palmer appeared on CNN and bragged about having
begin negotiations 3 years earlier with Pfeiffer who gave him guidance
on what portions of the business Compaq was interested in. Prior to the
downsizing of Digital by Palmer, Digital was too big a fish for Compaq
to swallow. The FAB is but only one business that Palmer got rid of. the
DLT drives is another, the disk drives another, the networking gear is
another and on and on and on.


So I repeat my question again, what was Palmer doing with the FAB prior
to 1996 when he started talking to Compaq ?

Regards
Andrew Harrison

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Alpha remembrance day
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