What ever happened to Tandem and NonStop OS 1967

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PDPs were minis turned maxis...

A mircocomputer has as its CPU a microprocessor, unless you can clarify that...

RISC changed that.

The problem was that eventually the LSI-11 went away and enter a time- gap, followed by the Alpha. Said timegap is what I stated end the company, IMO. IOW, despite the success of the Alpha, they were already dead. It just hadn't caught up with them yet. Sort of like a big old white oak tree that has caught a disease.

Well, in the same sense that Commodore let the Amiga die by having a superior computer than the PC but not being able to market it.

I think the Alpha simply arrived too late. I'm not speaking about its technical abilities. Marketing.

Geez, all I'm saying is that between the LSI-11 and Alpha, DEC got out of the CPU business and it cost them. While Intel and Motorola went on with the 80x86 and the 680x0 DEC wasn't sure what it was. And when RISC came out DEC decided it try and jump in mid-stream. Does this mean that the Alpha was a bad chip? No! It just meant that DEC wasn't going to be able to compete that's all.

Early 90s in Bethesda, MD. Given by DEC. I went to an OSF-1 seminar in Greenbelt, MD as well at about the same time. Huge mock up of the Alpha chip on its back revealing all 421 or so pins, etc.

78?? No their PDP line was doing quite well and competing with everyone else in the minicomputer market. DEC moved with the times except they held on to the Vax for too long and didn't morph it into their micro line with Alpha well. They should have done what Sun did at that time and put Sun out of business, except they jumped on the Unix bandwagon too late.

Not in everything all the time, no. But when did DEC last innovate? Alpha? Wasn't that an afterthought to SPARC and other RISC chips?

Show me the numbers. The bell shaped curve where they went up and then went down. Then we'll plot it along side Sun, SGI and any other workstation company.

Hell, by your definition Apollo was a successful workstation company.

I'm talking about marketing. Alpha came into being at a time when Sun and SGI were the big players in the workstation market. Both of them are still around, DEC is gone. See this timeline:

I like AMD better than Intel! In fact, when I put a system together I usually use AMD if I can help it. I rememebr that they were the second source for the Mot 6800 back in the day.

Eric