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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