creat 1234

I guess my main critcism would have to be that they had the wrong design goals. Had I been running the group and they came to me with the choice you described I would have sent them back to the drawing board. You can't build a new computer which does meet the needs of your installed base. Alignment was-is also a serious problem, for performance. I met some of the designers at Decus in DC in 1994 and when I confronted them with these issues they suggested you just needed to edit your source code and recompile. They had apparently didn't think PL-I, Cobol and Fortran were important. They had designed a new C machine for a virgin market. That's why I formed the impression that it was a mismanged project out of control. Of course, I have always had the view that abandoning VAX development was the biggest blunder of all. How many billions were spent on Alpha, and now it is relegated to the dust bin of history. Consider where they would be today with all that money into VAX development. If you can make a pig like X86 spin at 3+ GHz consider what you would have gotten with a clean architecture like the VAX, and it would not have been difficult to put in 64 bit extensions as AMD and Intel have for x86. Of course, that is all expressed in the subjunctive, but it is cathartic.

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