virtual memory 4508

the mid-range 370 4341 had somewhat similar issue. i've posted the us & world-wide sales for vax, broken out by model and year

... and noted that 4341 sales were actually larger than vax. part of it was some sort of threshold had been crossed and you saw large corporations placing orders for several hundred 4341s at a time.

the issue for the corporation was while the 4341 offered better price-performance than vax ... it was also better performance and better price-performance than the entry level model of the high-end machines. the high-end was where the majority of the revenue was ... and even tho 4341 was larger market than vax ... it still wasn't very significant revenue compared to the high-end.

towards the mid-80s, one of the executives of the high-end division gave a talk that included the comment that something like 11,000 of the vax sales should have been 4341s.

as mentioned here the total of 750 & 780 sales (thru 1988) was approx. 46k

... so the 11,000 that should have been 4341s represented nearly 1-4th of the total combined 750 & 780 sales

however, one of the things that they failed to note was that in some of the internal politics between the mid-range 4341 division and the high-end division ... the high-end division managed to limit allocation of some components needed for buidling 4341s (which was viewed by some as trying to minimize the impact 4341 sales could have on the high-end entry-level machines).

of course by the mid-80s, you were starting to see customers in that mid-range market moving to workstations and high-end PCs for their computing needing. you can also see that in the vax sale numbers in the mid-80s ... while there was continued growth in vax sales during that period ... much of the numbers had shifted to micro-vaxes.

as posted before ... in the later 80s the world wide corporate revenue was approaching $60b and executives were projecting that it would double to $120b (they turned out to be wrong, it was possibly a career limiting move on my part at the time to start predicting that the company was heading into the red).

this gives revenue for 86 as $51.25b and over 400k employees. and $58.6b for 1988

quicky search turns up this for a little comparison, this gives DECs revenue for the last qtr of 1985 and 1986 ($1.9b and $2.3b respectively)

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