DEC Alpha (was: Re: Docs we will need)

[Eric S. Raymond]

Achim Gratz via devel <devel at ntpsec.org>:
> I visited DEC in Palo Alto one time and got to see the very first Alpha
> mainboard (with an alcohol heatpipe made from a glass tube atop the
> CPU).

Damn shame about the Alpha. That was a good design that DEC utterly botched the
positioning and marketing of.

Back around 1998-'99 when I was being Mr. Famous Guy I was a speaker
at a conference run by investment bankers in NYC and found myself
afyerwards in conversation with a man who told me he was DEC's product
manager for the Alpha.

I don't remember whether this as just before or just after Clayton
Christensen published "The Innovators's Dilemma", but I already had
some grasp on the idea of capturing markets with a low-end attack.
And I *liked* the Alpha architecture; it made my compiler-jock heart
all happy.  I wanted it to win big.

So I asked the guy what his plans were for getting Alphas into low-end
systems in volume, e.g. other than big gold-plated servers.

He said breezily he didn't have any.

It wasn't so much the content as the tone that gave me a sinking
feeling in the pit of my stomach. Not just that that was a bad answer,
it was that he had *no idea why the question was interesting*. Utterly
clueless.

I knew right then the Alpha was doomed.  And it made me sad.

But a few years later some of the Alpha designers took their lessons to another
company and it became ARM.  So there's that.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>

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