[BUGS] hardware changing time .. moving forward

[harrywwc]

my turn...

ref: DEC Alpha chip and all that.

The Alpha 64bit chipset (starting with the 21064 in the early 90s) was 
really only designed to be around for 2 decades or so. With the demise 
of DEC, it really was killed off by HP only about 5 years 'early'.

A good friend of mine was a design engineer with the Alpha project for 
DEC/Compaq/HP. She's now a Project Manager in the OpenVMS Engineering 
Group with their port to Intel Itanium. Some other friends of mine 
worked at 'FAB-6' (HLO) in Hudson MA where the chips were manufactured.

Anyway, the bit Jonathan was referring to with 'AMD' and the Alpha was 
actually Intel and the Pentium chips.

It seems that Intel 'borrowed' some ideas from the Alpha and 
incorporated them into the Pentium. DEC twigged to this (not hard to 
figure out with the *very* smart people at Alpha Engineering) and sued 
Intel, and wanted royalties for each and every Pentium chip being sold 
(and there were lots!).

At about this time DEC was haemorrhaging money like mad, and needed some 
money fast, and suing Intel was going to get them the money needed, but 
not "fast". One of the items causing the losses for DEC was the 
aforementioned FAB-6. So Intel agreed to license the Alpha Technology 
for a largish amount of money -and- the purchase of FAB-6. This was 
about 1996 or so.

So Intel could then legally incorporate a lot of Alpha technology in the 
Penitum family of chips - and did.

DEC announced the sale to Compaq Jan 26, 1998 - ten years ago :'(

I loved working for them - hated working for Compaq.

reg's,

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|h|a|r|r|y|
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(formerly harry at labats.sno.dec.com)

-- 

harry [at] woodward-clarke [dot] com
imago Dei in quolibet homine' inveniartur