Re: Alpha remembrance day


Hoff Hoffman wrote:
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.

Of course, as I pointed out to Bill its about balance. As the amount of
physical memory configurable in a system crept up there came a point
where having 64bit support became usefull because you could actually
use the >4GB while having a decent number of CPU's etc.

But the the TurboLaser never supported enough of CPU/Memory and I/O at
the same time in the same box to make 64bit addressing for individual
processes usefull except in some edge cases and for the very sucessfull
benchmarketing program run by Digital when Alpha was introduced.

And by the time AlphaServers did support configurations that made 64bit
support worthwhile everyone else had 64bit OS's anyway. Solaris 7 Sun's
first 64bit OS was released in 1998. HP-UX 11 supported 64bit in 1997.

Or put another way by the time AlphaServers acheived the balance
necessary to support the marketing campaign which Digital launched in
1992 all Alphas major competitors had the same capability and Digital
had vanished.


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?)

No HP generally isn't a competitor, nor are my points anti Compaq or
HP. If you have followed the thread you will realise that I am
interested in the over simplistic Palmer killed Alpha and DEC argument
which does the rounds everytime there is some sort of
Alpha/DEC/digital/Compaq aniversary.

Regards
Andrew Harrison

.

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