Re: Alpha remembrance day

flatts1 wrote:

....

Bill Todd wrote (while quoting Andrew):

2. Having belatedly realised that VAX wasn't going to survive the
onslaught of the RISC processors DEC initiated the short lived MIPS
platform running Ultrix a plaform seriously hampered by the fact that
DEC had not only missed catching the RISC wave but had also failed to
catch the UNIX wave as well. DEC sales people prefered selling VMS/VAX
and senior management openly denigrated UNIX while funding a product
division to develop it. Sounds mad now.


This lost DEC market share to Sun, HP, IBM and SGI who had no such
qualms about selling UNIX.



But (yet again) this couldn't possibly have contributed to the
*decline*
of a product which had not even been introduced yet. In fact, if
anything it gave Alpha a lower starting point from which regaining lost

market share might have been easier than beginning with more of it.
========================================

I agree with Andrew.

Then you're as analytically-incompetent as he is: try reading the above more carefully until you understand what it says - it's a very specific refutation of a very specific assertion, not some kind of nebulous 'denial' that you seem to confuse it with below.

....

Bill, much of your perspective does have merit but it is lost within
your bitterness in how things turned out.

Horse***. My primary concern is that people who refuse to learn from experience are condemned to repeat it - and that's especially true of the stalwarts here who in some ways are the blindest of the blind (everyone with better sight having left already).

Of course, many of them have perfectly valid reasons and/or actual needs for having stuck with VMS: the problem is that many of them, having perpetuated this in some ways personal investment, resist seeing surrounding circumstances for what they really are.

So realistic evaluations of exactly how things came to be as they are today are important to me, and in this particular case evaluation of what potential Alpha actually had and what specifically prevented it from realizing that potential. To suggest that it was doomed due to decisions made before it even shipped, as Andrew has done, is flatly contradicted by the acceptance and growth that it enjoyed during its lifetime prior to being officially axed 5 years ago, *despite* for the most part conspicuous lack of commitment by its owners.

C'mon, do you think we
really care if someone makes a post with typos?

As just more evidence of general incompetence, yes.

It's sad but I can
relate. I used to be in your shoes and I went kicking and screaming to
UNIX/Solaris.

You clearly were never in anything very much resembling my shoes, since I gave up on DEC in disgust (though with great regret) in 1987 - while you left 'kicking and screaming' somewhat later. And I've been observing for many years here that while VMS had unique strengths back around that time, since then many other systems (specifically including several Unix variants) have caught up sufficiently that any residual advantage pales beside its being so out-of-step with what contemporary users want/are used to.

Which is of course a shame, since it by no means had to be so out of step, had its owners been at all interested in keeping it current.

- bill
.

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