
DEC Alpha: A History in Facts and Comments (2005) - fanf2
http://alasir.com/articles/alpha_history/
======
bsder
> Olsen refused the offer saying that the VAX architecture hadn't reached its
> end-of-life yet and EV4 was still a work in progress.

The rumor from multiple directions is that the Olsen and Sculley actually
_had_ a deal for Alphas in Apples. And then Olsen found Sculley "in flagrante
delicto" with a woman not Sculley's wife--which incensed Olsen enough that he
torpedoed the whole deal.

------
m0llusk
This is one of the most clear and also tragic demonstrations of a marketing to
engineering ratio driven failure:

"A long time ago, Kenneth Olsen, who was a founder, president and CEO of DEC
until almost the end, said that well engineered products would sell
themselves. So, there is no real need in advertising campaigns or other
instruments of market promotion."

------
drewg123
This article brings back so many memories.

My first job was as a sysadmin for a highly computational statistics
department in 1993. The first alpha we had was a DEC 300/500X ("hot pink
flamingo"). I remember adding 256MB of RAM to the box on one one of my very
first days on the job. At the time, the price for the memory was well into the
5 figures, and I was thinking that I'd better be careful, because the memory
was worth more than I was.

In a later job, I was one of 2 people to port FreeBSD to the DEC Alpha. We
never supported the older turbochannel boxes, but I did a lot of the chipset
support for most of the PCI alphas. Seeing the APECs diagram brought back
memories of implementing the board support for them (and most of the PCI based
alphas). I had an API UP1000 running FreeBSD as my desktop up until 2003 or
so. That box was given to me to do the FreeBSD platform support.

Much later I was lucky enough to work with Dick Sites at Google. When I
realized I was going to be in a meeting with him, I brought him my copy of the
alpha architecture reference manual to autograph. I can't say enough good
things about him. In addition to being a luminary in the field, he's a truly
wonderful human being.

------
ubermonkey
In the mid-90s, I worked at what had to be one of the last serious DEC/VMS
holdouts: TeleCheck.

That they had ended up on VMS was not evidence of a bad choice, but by 1995 it
was pretty clear which way the market was going, and that they were about to
be kinda out in the cold. They'd also managed to give themselves an ENORMOUS
case of the MUMPS (1), brought on by an almost religious devotion to "not
invented here" syndrome.

(Part of that was justified -- they couldn't get what they needed out of a
commercial DB early on, so they wrote their own. And then KEPT writing their
own well past the point when they should've been evaluating migration to COTS.
But that's just a background detail.)

Anyway, at that point if you read any industry press, or went to any industry
event, or were even vaguely aware of computing trends, you KNEW the future
didn't include VMS, and that even the Alpha architecture -- which was cool and
powerful! -- was doomed. But not at 5251 Westheimer; there, the Kool-aid was
DEC-flavored, even to the extent of making bizarre counterfactual claims about
COTS options, or other hardware, or whatever. "Sun" was a dirty word there;
hatred of Unix was an article of faith.

It probably won't surprise anybody to hear that turnover there was INSANE. I
stayed 25 months before moving on; that was about normal. Those that did stay
became more valuable to the organization, but not so much that they ever got
market raises or anything. And of course by staying, they let their skills get
farther and farther out of sync with the rest of the industry, thus making it
harder to leave.

1:
[https://thedailywtf.com/articles/A_Case_of_the_MUMPS](https://thedailywtf.com/articles/A_Case_of_the_MUMPS)

~~~
Rochus
What do you have against MUMPS (i.e. ANSI M)? It was a great technology of its
time, and there are still many critical applications running with it today,
and internationally recognized companies like Intersystems whose products
still run ANSI M inside.

~~~
jacquesm
> It was a great technology of its time

It was. And then that time came and went and after that it became harder and
harder to justify its continued existence and development of applications.

I've worked on a moderately complex mumps system for a bank and the amount of
arcane trickery to work around the limitations of the core MUMPS system were
mind-boggling. The whole thing had to interact with other systems via trick
comms links and the fact that it worked at all was a small miracle.

There are some other systems that are still in use even today that should have
probably never been built in FoxPRO, Filemaker and other pieces of software of
a certain age.

~~~
Rochus
Well, some MUMPS implementations had adverse limitations, but there were also
others, and companies like Intersystems managed to gradually expand and
continue using the technology successfully. What becaume know as "NoSQL" was
already available in MUMPS 40 years earlier. MUMPS as a language has many
disadvantages, but the concepts are still amazing today.

~~~
dreamcompiler
NoSQL databases came before SQL, irrespective of MUMPS. But back then they
just called them databases.

------
robk
Still blows my mind how NT ran on so many other platforms yet no one was able
to really capitalize on it. I spent one of my summer internships in Littleton
MA doing QA on the NT networking stack for SMB and other lanman features. The
machines kept my cube hot despite the building AC but seemed pretty performant
versus my i386 home PC at the time.

------
dekhn
I truly loved the alpha but by '97 or '98 it was clear it was not a good
platform for me. I remember being told to buy a basic alpha for $15K. Instead
I bought an entire Linux cluster for that price, learned to manage it, and got
all my scientific work done at larger scale than other people in my
department.

~~~
jacquesm
At roughly that same time I did buy an Alpha but for one reason only: it could
use more than 4G of RAM in Linux and files could be larger than 4G. It was the
cheapest 64 bit platform at the time and I needed that to be able to use very
large MySQL tables. Very nice hardware, super reliable and it ran for many
years.

~~~
dekhn
Yup. At the same time I bought my linux boxes, the department next door was
purchasing ES40s, assembling them into TruClusters, and running modest MySQL
tables. They ran on that until the hardware and software was EOL'd. Later I
worked with an 8-node TruCluster composed of monster GS1280s. It had some nice
properties- especially the high throughput IO (100MB/sec!)

The industrial version of the human genome was assembled on large-memory
Alphas for the same reasons (lots of RAM, predictable disk IO).

------
downerending
Sounds ridiculous, but I still remember the lack of synchronous reporting of
divide-by-zero errors, and wasn't really sad to be rid of it.

------
tyingq
You know you're on to something when Microsoft ports Windows to your ISA.

At one time, NT supported Alpha, MIPS, and PowerPC.

~~~
ch_123
The Alpha support was mainly because of a lawsuit, I suspect that was also why
it lasted the longest of the non x86 ports of the 90s.

Reference: [https://www.itprotoday.com/compute-engines/windows-nt-and-
vm...](https://www.itprotoday.com/compute-engines/windows-nt-and-vms-rest-
story)

~~~
sterwill
Perhaps it lasted longer because you could actually buy Alpha computers from
DEC with Windows NT installed. Could you ever buy MIPS or PowerPC computers
from a major vendor with Windows NT installed?

~~~
tyingq
Not saying it was a raging success, but yes, you could buy MIPS machines with
Windows NT installed:
[http://www.sensi.org/~alec/mips/acer_pica.html](http://www.sensi.org/~alec/mips/acer_pica.html)

~~~
sterwill
I had never heard of the PICA-61, thanks! I owned a DEC Multia back in the
late 90s, when they were already obsolete and plentiful. It had SRM firmware,
not ARC, but I didn't have any interest in running NT on it anyway. Ran Linux
really well and used it as my personal server for years. Later I put NetBSD on
it for a short time, but I don't remember why. I remember the it frequently
printing messages about unaligned memory traps to the console, but it did the
job.

I'm sure Microsoft was sincerely hedging their architecture with NT on
MIPS/Alpha/PowerPC/i960/etc at the start, but by the time that hardware
shipped with NT on it was pretty clear all the momentum wasn't leaving x86. On
the 64-bit Alpha, I believe NT userspace was still 32-bit and so were all the
applications. I don't remember any 64-bit Alpha NT applications ever shipping,
but I admit I wasn't watching that scene very closely.

------
Lammy
The title of this submission doesn't do a good job conveying that it's about
the DEC Alpha CPU architecture. It says so in the first sentence, but that
doesn't matter if the headline doesn't grab you. This is one I wish mods would
editorialize a little :)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_Alpha](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_Alpha)

~~~
Lammy
Thank you, whoever made the change!

