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What to buy?

Not forgetting proliant servers, arguably Compaq's greatest asset

The saga has been gone over ad nauseum in the dec groups, ever since the cancellation, but suffice to say Alpha development costs were miniscule compared to itanium, performance was far higher and they were making significant profit. Hp were and are in bed with intel with itanium and at the time and itanium performance was underwhelming to say the least. Hp wanted itanium for a pa risc replacement and had sunk considerable time and effort into the project. Intel thought that it would be the next Big Thing that would monopolise the cpu market, with the added advantage that it was so complex that it could never be copied, unlike x86.

As things stand now, only a few vendors build Itanic (as it's known :-) systems and it's just another niche product, will never cover cost of development and whose performance has been overtaken by advances in simpler x86 technology, primarily via 64 bit extensions. It may seem smug, but most people who are interested in the advancement of the state of the art in computing find it quite amusing that intel and hp have fallen flat on their face on this, because the politics and nih factor have been plain to see all along to anyone with even half a clue. After all the money that had been spent and hype about performance advantage, no one involved could admit that the approach was wrong to start with, so they just kept and even now, keep going.

The latest itanium has only just caught up with Alpha in performance terms and that's after a 6 or more year interval and billions (No, not a typo) of $ spent on development. Compare that to the few 100's of million *overall* spent on Alpha development :-)...

Regards,

Chris

Reply to
ChrisQ
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I still use a dos 5 boot on old laptops for some Borland C comms utilities that were written 10 or more years ago, just becasue they are still usefull. They access hardware directly, modify timers and interrupt hooks and more, so they probably wouldn't run under any version of windows. Many companies i've worked with are still using w2k or even w95 for software development, with a few xp boxes dotted around to run later windows office type apps. W2k was arguably the first really robust windows release, the apps are often the same and the os doesn't degrade or wear out, so there's no business case to change. Some product lifetimes run into decades anyway and the client will sometimes demand that you keep copies of the original tools, emulators, build environment and even hardware environment for future maintenance and upgrades.

Powerfull computing is commodity now. ie: At one level, it's little more than consumer electronics and driven by the same upgrade / replace commercial mantra as tv sets and washing machines :-)...

Regards,

Chris

Reply to
ChrisQ

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That has become quite common for embedded systems and industrial control systems.

Reply to
JosephKK

The *service* on those servers was worth the company. HP had no need for another line of computers or the development team that went with them.

The national debt is peanuts compared to Itanic development costs. ;-) The point was that Alpha was not making money and would never make money. Itanic was a gigantic flop, but few knew it at the time (I did ;-).

The fact that Itanic sucks, has nothing to do with Alpha's prospects at the time. Look what's been done with x86. Few would have expected that 20 years ago.

Spoken like an absolute geek.

Reply to
krw

Don't bother. Get a new drive, an external drive and download the free version of Macrium Reflect. Makes perfect drive images. That's how I did mine.

Reply to
T

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I remember back when I first started with Microsim that Release 8 came out. It added some very needed features, and was MORE reliable and stable than the previous versions. The sales guys had trouble keeping up with the upgrades and expanded orders... ;-)

Charlie

Reply to
Charlie E.

after

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Then OrCAD, then Cadence... they not only are killing it, but attempted neutering it as well, by removing features. But an engineering manager at ON Semi clued me in on how to put 'em back ;-) ...Jim Thompson

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| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     |
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Reply to
Jim Thompson

The owner of Ohio Brush in Cleveland, Ohio offered a free belt driven lathe on news:rec.crafts.metalworking the other day. The added an electric motor decades ago, but the overhead driveshafts are still in place in the building they've used since 1942.

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Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

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