Ed’s comments in the “Itanic saga” about the Elbrus being alive inside Intel reminded me of another CPU platform which Compaq sold to Intel in favour of Itanium and VLIW. Great move.
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When at the very beginning of the Alpha architecture’s way, DEC’s high management made a great strategic mistake. It was a known fact that first prototypes of EV4 were presented on a computer conference in February of 1991. Among others, there were engineers of Apple Computer admitted, looking for a new processor architecture to power company’s future computers, and they were impressed by advantages of EV4. John Sculley, Apple’s CEO of those days, met with Kenneth Olsen in June of the same year and offered him to use the new processor of DEC in future Macs. Olsen refused the offer motivating that the processor was not ready for the market, besides the VAX architecture hadn’t reached its end-of-life yet. Several months later, rumours said that new Macs would be powered by PowerPC processors from the alliance of Apple, IBM and Motorola.
What an alternative timeline this could have been!
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The Alpha was doomed because DEC had no real mass consumer market
like APPLE or IBM PC’s I see it in hindsight. Perhaps if you could play ‘DOOM’
on Windows NT, things may have changed a bit. I am assuming NT had the
Alpha cpu as NT version.
Regardles by the end of day, politics back dealings seem more important
than what cpu you use.
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NT was running on Alpha, and MIPS, and PowerPC. It’s not for the lack of engineering effort or ingenuity that platforms die.
There was also fx!32 which emulated x86 on Alpha on NT.
[added: though I think what killed Alpha and DEC, which was very much selling on the performance, is the combined tsunami of x86 chips getting ever faster and Linux – which also killed off many legacy UNIXes. Ironically, I knew a brilliant presales engineer from Digital/Finland, who talked the company into giving certain CS student called Linus an Alpha workstation for porting Linux.]
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Ken Olsen was kicked out by DEC in 1992, the same year the Alpha was released.
I would suggest that Robert Palmer, Ken Olsen’s successor was not up to the job of fixing Olsen’s errors and steering the company into the modern world.
On the technical front, the Alpha rang alarm bells with me when I realised it had no truly native byte handling modes.
But was that not a common feature of other RISC’s.
Maybe - but the Alpha was suppose to be The Great New Thing … and yet seemed to be missing a key instruction set feature. (I believe the instruction set was ‘improved’ later to improve byte handling .. which, while useful, simply confirms that it was broken from Day One)
I can kind of see what Ken Olsen was about. Ramping up Alpha production (at a rate necessary to satisfy the demand for a consumer platform like Apple) would have been quite a risky business for DEC (and may have been beyond their current capabilities), sacrificing the renown VAX platform along the way. This wouldn’t have been a smooth transition, at all. Not going for this would have allowed to extract what was still in the VAX and also to further develop the Alpha to be ready for prime time. (And Apple and its demands for performance tweaks that would have suited their platform was likely to become yet another distraction.) In light of other decisions by Olsen, this was probably a sane decision, avoiding what may have been a lose-lose scenario for DEC. For the board, however, DEC was probably just sitting on a valuable asset and extracting nothing from this. – From a consumer’s point of view, Macs on Alpha with DEC as a technological backbone should have made for interesting times. (Could have DEC survived this and continued to remain a major systems manufacturer? I really don’t know.)
Byte extensions were in EV56 which was released out in 1996, while the original architecture EV4 was released in 1992. The last released architecture was EV7z, in 2003.
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DEC was an amazing company with generally excellent staff.
It’s decline was very rapid following Palmer’s arrival.
Maybe a coincidence, maybe not.
GPT5: “Markets doomed DEC, but Palmer’s actions ensured no chance of pivot. He operated more as a corporate mortician than a rescuer.”
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I’ve to admit, I’m kind of an Olsen fan. If we look for what the second largest systems manufacturer and the second richest man in the wealthiest country should be like, DEC and Olsen probably aren’t a bad guess.
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Just a quick note, not just to you but to everyone, please don’t post LLM outputs here. Much better to find a citation and link to a webpage, that’s much more interesting and more authentic - even if the webpage is wrong about something.
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