From: Andrei Chichak (acpmiedm_at_telusplanet.net)
Date: Thu Aug 19 2004 - 10:21:09 PDT
At 07:42 AM 8/19/2004, you wrote:
>I used to use an Alpha time-sharing system for quite some time. What
>great machines. HP's botched merger has definitely damaged the Alpha
>line even more than Compaq did when they were still themselves.
With all due respect and without wanting to start a flame war, here are my
personal thoughts on this matter:
EEEHHH, who cares? The National Semiconductor 32032 was a great processor.
It died. The VAX was a great processor. It died. The alpha was a great
processor. It died.
HP makes their own PA-RISC processor, why would they want to dilute their
own market by promoting a processor that cuts into their own sales? That
would be like Apple using Alphas. It just doesn't make sense.
As the guys from IKEA would say, "Don't feel bad for the [processor], it
has no feelings".
Tandem, another one of Compaq/HP's systems, originally used their own
processors. They later switched over to MIPS processors (Tandem people sat
on the Board of MIPS and MIPS people sat on the Board of Tandem and they
were just down the street, and making their own processors was EXPENSIVE),
then they used Alphas when they got bought by DEC, then (I believe) X86s.
As far as the COBOL programmers were concerned, an atomic transaction using
TMF and SQL was an atomic transaction using TMF and SQL.
Was a NextStep on black hardware good whereas a NextStep on white hardware
bad? God King Steve didn't think so.
Why do you care if the Alpha dies? You could always go out and buy yourself
an Alpha box running NT4 or something more current. Why are you writing
assembly code? Granted, the X86 architecture is a hack and deserves to
die, but unless you are building hardware or doing operating system
software development, it just doesn't matter.
You could always start a support group and lobby the manufacturer to either
push the system back into production or release the source code so that
development can continue. Oh, wait a second, you're already a part of one.
Andrei
-- This is the NewtonTalk list - http://www.newtontalk.net/ for all inquiries Official Newton FAQ: http://www.chuma.org/newton/faq/ WikiWikiNewt for all kinds of articles: http://tools.unna.org/wikiwikinewt/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Aug 19 2004 - 10:30:03 PDT