Re: Alpha remembrance day

Michael Kraemer wrote:
In article <44E6087E.FA9BDDEC@xxxxxxxxxxxx>, JF Mezei
<jfmezei.spamnot@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Well, considering it was the first "mainstream" 64 bit architecture, I
wouldn't say that Alpha was late. If at all, it was early to the market.

even if it were true (Andrew corrected you on that one), so what ?
It is just now, more than a decade later that people start really looking
at 64 bit stuff.

Ah, you must be a PC weenie: that could explain a lot. Of course, even PC weenies might have recognized what benefits a 64-bit architecture could confer on systems configured with 4 GB or less of RAM (let alone the 64 GB that IA32 servers have supported since 1996 - hmmm, I wonder why Intel bothered with that?) if he were familiar with NT/2K/XP's 32-bit approach to its file system cache and how much *virtual* space it can waste.

The more serious part of the industry has of course been 'really looking at 64 bit stuff' for considerably longer - it having been one significant reason, for example, why Tru64 enjoyed the level of success it did despite its owner's earlier Unix missteps, and why the rest of the RISC brigade tried to catch up with Alpha and MIPS in that regard sooner rather than later.

In 1992, there simply was no use for 64 bit integers or 64 bit pointers.
(64 bit FP already existed for decades on other architectures).
My home DEC 3000 (of 1993/4) has room for as little as 192MB.
My home alphastation 500 (of 1996) offers just 512 MB (and still is partially
empty because modules aren't cheap/easy to find).
So what's the practical use for 64 bit addressing if one can't even fill 32bit ?

I guess you don't have a clue what the "VM" part of VMS was designed to support, either.

Certainly you do not suggest to use swap space for large matrix
multiply, do you ?

Or perhaps you're simply ignorant of the concept of working sets (if all you're familiar with is large matrix multiplies, that wouldn't be surprising).

....

DEC was downsized out of
existance uder Palmer, partly due to "suggestions" by Pfeiffer.


When Palmer took over DEC was already about to die.

I guess you don't know how to read a balance ***, either. While it's likely true that DEC needed some pruning to get back to something closer to its roots that its culture could better cope with, when *all* you do is prune all you eventually wind up with is a pile on the ground (though a fairly valuable pile - IIRC DEC had something like $4 - $6 billion in cash when Compaq bought it).

Using the cash generated by intelligent pruning to fix what remained would have yielded results at least as impressive as Gerstner's: DEC still had a lot of good people, and a lot more who would have returned if they'd seen what they wanted to see there - and turning a company (and a culture) like DEC around would undoubtedly have been easier than turning IBM around was.

- bill
.