I had a brief look at a few of the parts. Since I've been looking a bit at Digital systems recently, along with various competitors, I think that you're right that Alpha was the key to Digital having their universal platform, which is what HP largely achieved with PA-RISC, but it left a gap at the low end, and arrived too late to turn the ship around. Their universal platform may have been an illusion by then, as well.I know there's plenty of controversy to keep everybody entertained entertained in my Acorn "chapter", but has anybody looked at the series so far?
Digital getting duped into pitching Alpha for NT was one thing, but the company had dithered since the mid-1980s on RISC technology and competitive Unix workstation products, despite having technology available to bring to market. I mentioned the Titan efforts at DEC's Western Research Laboratory in another post. Instead, they had this adversarial culture which was then brought to heel through consolidation under Dave Cutler, whose solution was to concoct a brand new operating system for a brand new architecture whose development then predictably dragged out.
It was only when the WRL people went and did their own MIPS-based workstation, and only got approval for it on the basis that it would largely re-use elements of the scheduled VAXstation 3100, that they had a sellable product: the less-than-coincidentally-named DECstation 3100. When DEC subsequently decided, for various reasons, that they would spin up Alpha as a project and bring it to market in products, they could have kept the DECstation line going, but instead they terminated the line and alienated a bunch of customers while mumbling things about porting to Alpha when customers could just port to, say, POWER and PA-RISC, which they did.
I also noted your remark about the SGI machines having astronomical pricing, but $10000 for an Indigo was pretty reasonable for what you got, and that pricing stuck around for its successors. One competitor of Digital hoped that people would buy its minicomputers for their processing power at ten times that, complaining that the workstation vendors were underpricing their machines.
Statistics: Posted by paulb — Thu Dec 18, 2025 12:35 am