Re: Alpha remembrance day

Andrew wrote:

Again you are mistaken, Sun spent a great deal of time worrying about
losing business to Alpha because of its 64bit support. However after
the initial flurry of purchases many customers discovered that you
couldn't really benefit from having a 64bit platform at least not with
Alpha and so Sun stopped worrying.

Yeah, I heard similar from various Sun folks, too. I'd just assumed it was the party line for the Sun sales and field folks. And it was something that always struck me as a denial artfully mixed with a slam, which looked like marketeering.

The key to that Sun spiel was the 64 bits part, as nobody then or now needs that much space and isn't likely to need that for quite some time -- it was the lack of the 33rd or 34th bit that was at the crux of the support, and we have any number of folks that slammed into limit that on OpenVMS VAX, and I slammed into similar limits in various Unix flavors over the years. And more than a few databases use the extra addressing, as well, and both SPARC and AMD Opteron now have the addressing. So it clearly looks to have value, and apparently enough that even Sun customers needed it.

And you can bet that Sun was concerned about Alpha, as that bunch was traditionally smart enough not to be complacent -- case in point: yourself, and your valued loyal opposition on-going presence here in the comp.os.vms newsgroup, and the current "you paid how much for a cut-out of two of the founders of silicon valley?" marketeering. (And are the HP OpenVMS folks now viewed as competitors for Symantec, or did Sun partner with Symantec when I wasn't looking?)



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