Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

DEC never understood the computer market once machines started to be sold on price and dipped well below $50k - odd, given the fact that the company started by selling machines that were small and cheap enough to be used by a couple of people. The maintenance of the huge price differential for "real" VMS/UNIX machines vs. Windows boxes was another pointless exercise. DEC is an example of a company that died because of their marketing ineptness (whereas MS could be construed as a company that suceeded soley because of their marketing prowess).

Linux will survive on Itanium for a while yet. Altix commitments will guarantee that. No one's saying that the PC market was doomed, citing IBM's leaving as evidence.

My apologies for being completely off-topic for a moment ... some internal memos and other docs from the Prism project are available on bitsavers. Its interesting to see what was happening in DEC at that time:
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/prism/

Look at the the last page of this memo, and then look at the original NT design team
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/prism/ ... nation.pdf

Microsoft owe a lot to the guy at DEC who cancelled the Prism project. They basically managed
to assemble an experienced OS team for NT as a direct result of it.

Yeah, it's all in this great book "showstopper" and how Dave Cutler cut a deal with MS, that not only would they take the software team, but also the hardware team... Love him or hate him, Dave stuck it out for his people....

But then, could you imagine DEC licensing it's OS to run on other CPU's and on other hardware..? that'd be madness!

Slightly offtopic, but I didn't think this was big enough to start a new thread for. HP is coming out with "Tukwila"-equipped Integrity servers on the 27th. I'm interested to see how having the vastly faster bus improves performance.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/194746/h ... _week.html

I'm interested in seeing if some of the people who do clustering (Infiniband/NUMALink) with QPI Xeons carry their tech over to Tukwila (looking at SGI here). It'd just make sense.

Wasn't the tukwila stuff announced forever ago? I found this from the register:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/03 ... _followup/

And yet there is a bunch of posts around February this year announcing the Tukwila stuff ( http://www.communities.hp.com/online/bl ... -next.aspx ) but apparently it didn't ship then, but it will next week?

But that's been the story of the Itanium... Sometimes I wonder if it's been purposely held back to allow the xenon to catch up... Then again a chip with ~2 billion transistors is no doubt a little complicated to FAB...!

I just think that fewer supported OS's is a bad thing.... It's never good to see big vendors exit your market.... Even if it is Microsoft.... Sometimes you do need a super computer to push things like Exchange or SQL 2008 into something usable.

I think until AMD came into the space with K8 Opterons it was the other way around - the Itanium is definitely supposed to be a higher-margin part for Intel so I'm assuming they'd try to push sales to it. Now Intel have to compete aggressively with AMD in the x86 space though so they can't afford to hold anything back.

I really really really want one of these but I am so scared of what the prices are going to be. I can imagine the base 2u being 20k at least...

I don't know about that. The Montvale Integrity systems were available under $10k, I would figure the Tukwila ones at just a bit more.

And, as it turns out, no new Integrity systems except blades until later this year. I keep wondering to myself if HP is deliberately trying drive everyone to IBM, or if they're just morons.

Well, they did hire Carly Fiorina. Then they paid her millions of dollars to go away before she could entirely destroy the company..

Why are these major corporations such pansy losers ? They hire people who drive them into the ground, then they pay them a king's ransom to leave. Just tell them to clean out your desk by noon, ma'am. If the nonperforming jerks make trouble, counter-sue for the fifty billion the stupid c.e.o. cost the company.

Someone is getting fleeced in the US and it ain't the bozo managers.

They don't do it because it would make all the other CEOs unhappy.

We certainly couldn't have that now, could we ?

Are you guys ever going to wake up, or will you just sit there and watch these "managers" flush the country down the toilet ?

Hamei, Carly has moved onto greener pastures. No longer content with having had almost killed HP, she's now running for Senate to see if she can do the same thing to the entire country.

I dislike Barbara Boxer intensely, but if Fiorina gets the Republican nomination, I hope Boxer wins.

A population of 37 million and this is the best choice California can come up with ... I'm speechless.

Shall we link this thread to the one about impending doom ? Who needs the Mayans when we're perfectly capable of doing the job ourselves ?

I still laugh remembering that HP branded iPod.... I think it was around then, when it was painfully clear that Apple was the brand that people sought, not HP. I wonder how much HP paid Apple for that thing....

I guess it can't be any worse then that Motorola ROKR phone.

For a while I thought .NET could be relevant here; Microsoft has been pushing that for ages.

But unless you have an Apple style arch change fiat, it could take 20 years for most software to move that way if that's the way they wanna go.

And of course you'll still have stragglers.

IIRC it took years before Photoshop finally had the Motorola 68k code scrubbed out so it could run on Intel Macs.

Right. I remember when the old mainframe companies - Amdahl, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Siemens, ... - claimed that the mainframe was dead, and that UNIX would take it all over. They stopped their production lines, and laughed at IBM investing huge piles of cash in new mainframe series.

"Because hey, all those reliability and performance features are appearing on UNIX too. IBM will be killing off its mainframe branch in no time. They're burning money for nothing now."

2010: IBM sells more mainframes than ever, and earns billions on it. It also has a 95+ percent marketshare. Volume doesn't matter if the margin is high enough, and the sales are steady. The xenons (? I guess you mean xeons) are nowhere near the reliability an IA64 offers. Sure, for low-end and less-critical servers, things get moved from IA64/HPUX onto x86/Linux. But the high-end, highly critical market? Hah.

x86 has won out, yes. In volume, on the commodity market. But who gives a shit about commodity in the first place?