IBM's mini computerslack thereof 820

4341 w-vm was in the same market segment and time-frame as vax ... and i believe 4341-vm had bigger install base ... although as posted before ... there were several corporate issues that could have been interpreted as resulting in lost sales to vax.

part of this was that endicott's 4341 also was very strong compebreastor to pok's 3031 ... and as such there was some internal corporate political maneuvering.

rs6000 was much later.

risc-801-romp was going to be a display writer follow-on in the early 80s by the office products division. it was going to be CPr based with lots of implementation in pl.8. when that was cancelted, it was decided to quickly retarget the platform to the unix workstation market. somewhat to conserve skills .... a pl.8-based project was put together called the virtual resource manager .... that sort of provided a high-level abstract virtual machine interface (and implemented in pl.8). Then the vendor that had done the at&t port to ibm-pc for pc-ix was hired to do a similar port to the vrm interface. this became pc-rt and aix.

follow-on to pcrt-romp was rs6000-rios-power, the vrm was mostly eliminated and aixv3 was built to the rios chip interface. there is paper weight on my desk that has six chips with the legend: POWER architecture, 150 million OPS, 60 millon FLOPS, 7 million transistors. misc. 801-romp-rios postings

the executive that we reported to while we were doing ha-cmp

sample, specific post

left to head-up somerset ... the joint ibm, motorola, apple, et al effort for power-pc. differences between rios-power and power-pc .... rios-power was designed for flat out single processor thruput ... tending to multi-chip implementation and no provisions for cache coherency and-or multiprocessor support. the power-pc was going to single-chip implementation with support for multiprocessor cache coherency. it was the power-pc line of chips that show up in apple, as-400, and some flavors of rs-6000 ... while other flavors of rs-6000 were pure rios-power implementation (including the original rs-6000).

i have some old memories of arguments going on between austin and rochester over doing power-pc 65th bit implementation. unix-apple world just needed 64bit addressing. rochester-as400 was looking for a 65th bit tag line ... helping supporting their memory architecture.

post posting with some vax (us & worldwide) ship numbers

part of the issue was that the price-performance during vax & 4341 time-frame seemed to have broken some threshhold. You started to see customer orders for 4341s that were in the hundreds ... quite a few that were single orders for large hundreds of 4341s. this really didn't carry-over to the 4381 (4341 follow-on), since by that time, you started to see that market being taken over by large PCs and workstations.

specific post:

other past posts regarding the departmental computing-server market

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