From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: lm@mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy) Date: Thu, 28 Dec 2017 08:08:11 -0800 Subject: [TUHS] Why did PDPs become so popular? In-Reply-To: References: <20171228140551.B6F9418C079@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: <20171228160811.GA13474@mcvoy.com> On Thu, Dec 28, 2017 at 10:59:29AM -0500, Paul Winalski wrote: > On 12/28/17, Noel Chiappa wrote: > > > From: Paul Winalski > > > > > Lack of marketing skill eventually caught up to DEC by the late 1980s > > > and was a principal reason for its downfall. > > > > I got the impression that fundamentally, DEC's engineering 'corporate culture' > > was the biggest problem; it wasn't suited to the commodity world of computing, > > and it couldn't change fast enough. (DEC had always provided very well built > > gear, lots of engineering documentation, etc, etc.) > > > > I dunno, maybe my perception is wrong? > > I think you're right. The disinterest in marketing and advertising > (Ken Olsen, and therefore DEC, had a "build it and they will come" > mentality) was one aspect of the corporate culture. An example of its > negative impact: When the Alpha EV5 came out, it was several times > faster than anything else around. Got a reference for that performance claim? Wasn't that mid 1990's? If so, I was heavily into benchmarking and performance work during that period. If there was a processor that was 2x faster, let alone several times faster, I would have noticed. http://www.bitmover.com/lmbench/lmbench-usenix.pdf -- --- Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm