Re: Alpha remembrance day

Agreed Mike.

Plus, I guess the VAX 9000 and the Alpha did kill Digital. I
understand there were only about 425 VAX 9000 systems sold. Not very
many considering the R&D that must have gone on.

Steve

flatts1 wrote:
Hello,

It has been about 5 years since I have done any meanifngful work on VMS
(Vax or Alpha). Interestingly, this discussion is centered around that
timeframe and the events preceeding it. The last version of VMS that I
worked on was 7.1, as I recall.

It has probably been almost equally as long since I have visited this
newsgroup. This morning, for old time's sake, I decided to see what
was going on in VMS land these days and this thread really picqued my
interest.

When I virtually stopped working on VMS, I would say that I was at the
top of my game while supporting VMS and UNIX at about 80/20 percent
respecively. I used to joke to folks that I could probably forget more
about VMS than I would ever learn about UNIX. I'm rethinking that now
that I wave been working on Solaris/Windows since (about 70/30 percent
respectively).

I thank JF Mezie for initiating this thread. While on the one hand it
is depressing, it is also bringing back some very good memories and
experiences that I have had in the "good old days".

While it might appear that there has been some rigorous disagreement on
this topic, I think folks actually agree with each other more than they
don't. In other words, I think folks tend to agree on the numerous
tactical and strategic misteps that occured along the way with Alpha
and VMS. The disagreement seems to lay in pointing the finger at who
is responsible.

Regardless, I think it is just sad that DEC never could get their act
together which resulted in everyone else's OS reinventing the wheel to
become as robust as VMS was (is) on such things as clustering, system
auditing, system accounting, etc. Yes, you too can build a
blisteringly fast OS if you don't have to worry about all that fancy
overhead with each image activation :-).


Throughout this discussion, I think Andrew nailed it best with...

========================================
Andrew wrote:

The sad reality is that Alphas woes and eventual demise may have been
exacerbated or at least allowed to get worse by Palmer/Curly etc but
the seeds for Alphas decline were sown by DEC and their senior
management in the 80's before any of your favourite culprits were in
the frame.
========================================


And also...


========================================
Andrew wrote:

4. DEC started out as an alternative to IBM but ended up becoming a
mini IBM without the deep pockets or market share. DEC history is
littered with strategies that apparently had nothing to do with what
customers were asking for and everything to do with what DEC thought
customers wanted.
========================================

This last excerpt is so true. Even after Compaq bought DEC, it took
them forever to rename all of the DECthis and DECthat proprietary
verbiage. The DECnet Phase V example was excellent and I'll mention a
few more examples on where DEC missed the boat and/or just didn't get
it.


- DCL: One shell and only one shell - and it could only handle
integers. While a great "command" language with great lexical
functions, it had nothing on the native UNIX shells that supported real
number processing, arrays, etc.

- DSSI: Aptly a four letter word. The first time I saw a SCSI
connection on a DEC computer was on one of the first Alphas. It was
the very early '90s. Around 1992 or whenever Alpha "AXP 1.5" came out
(we were a Beta guinea pig). The rest of the world, of course, had
embraced SCSI much earlier. And let's face it, DEC would have much
preferred to still keep charging $400 for DSSI cables if they could.
It is this type of gouging that really left a sour taste in not only
managment's mouth but in system administrators' as well.

- UCX: In any of the other Operating systems that I can think of, you
get a network stack out of the box at no additional charge. Someone
correct me if I'm wrong but didn't DEC even charge for DECnet (and even
the "edt" editor)? I only installed the net-app-supp licences. I
never had to buy them. Anyway, when the rest of the world was moving
forward with free TCP/IP, DEC decided to charge it's customers for UCX.
I don't know about your experiences with UCX, but I think it says a
lot when a third party vendor can create a better and cheaper TCP/IP
interface that they don't even control the drivers to. I'm referring
to "Multinet" which was much easier to administer than UCX was.
Unfortunately, it did still rely on the native UCX drivers which left
Multinet and DEC pointing fingers at each other when something broke on
Multinet.

- PATHWORKS anyone: I still have nightmares.

- Polycenter: This was actually a very useful suite of tools (system
watchdog, performance analayizer, remote system managment, etc). It
worked like a champ. The support was top notch and they could really
speak the same language as you. Then DEC sold it to Computer
Associates who couldn't even spell VMS who then assimilated it to their
Unicenter. Now that was a bonehead move on DEC's part.

- ALL-IN-ONE: I don't know how this ever made DEC money. The only
time I ever saw it in use was when I worked at DEC and also at College
where I presume it was donated.

- Perl, Apache, and other GNU stuff: They all had caveates when it
came to VMS ports AND EVEN WHEN IT CAME TO THE DEC UNIX PORTS. When
DEC did finally decide to port some of these themselves, it was always
way behind their UNIX counterparts that could simply install the latest
versions at will.


========================================
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. Do you recall the book, "UNIX For DCL Users".
This was the one from "Digital Press". Very watered down and it
confused folks more than informed them.

Bill, much of your perspective does have merit but it is lost within
your bitterness in how things turned out. C'mon, do you think we
really care if someone makes a post with typos? It's sad but I can
relate. I used to be in your shoes and I went kicking and screaming to
UNIX/Solaris. But I'm I over it now and I'm better for it. You need
to move on, dude. It's best for everyone. :-)

Also Bill, they're not called "Legacy Systems" for nothing. You're not
buying a computer, you're buying into a company for the long haul.
Andrew was right to point out all of the earlier blunders by DEC did
little to instill confidence in Alpha or anything else down the pike
for that matter.


========================================
Andrew wrote:

The initial Alpha sucess, replacing the VAX cluster ended in a Solaris
migration
because the components the bank wanted simply did not exist on Alpha
for either Tru64 or OpenVMS.
========================================

This happened EVERYWHERE and, as mentioned earlier, was probably the
single most important factor why VMS died. Although the decision by SW
vendors not to port to VMS had many other underpinnings! What good is
all that great reliability and performance of Alpha/VMS clusters when
the newest version of your critical app isn't available for it.

I once worked for a large bank in the "Midrange Group". They took
their system security very seriously. We had comprehensive audits
twice a year. On the VMS side we maintened very detailed reports of
VMS' auditing trails and a litany of sysgen parameters were set and
verified. When it came time to audit the IBM AIX systems, they just
wanted to make sure there were no generic accounts and that strong
passwords were used. There were simply no functional equivilents in
security (at the time) for the AIX boxes. I always wondered how AIX
even got its foot in the door there but management didn't really seem
to care because the app they needed to run wasn't avaialable on VMS.

I worked at DEC for 4.63 years. That is what it said on my layoff
package - which meant that I was conveniently not vested (under 5
years). While I was there, I saw the introduction of the VAX 9000.
This was the one that was supposed to make or break the company. Then
there was the Alpha chip. Again, this too was supposed to make or
break the company. Then the sell out to Compaq and the rest is
history. Just another example of a great product with crappy marketing
and management.

Best,
Mike F.

P.S.
Not sure if this is old hat to everyone but a DEC sales person once
told me that OSF stood for "O"ppose "S"un "F"orever.

.

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