From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: paul.winalski@gmail.com (Paul Winalski) Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2017 13:37:23 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie! [ really sun vs dec/apollo ] In-Reply-To: <201709111649.v8BGnGTx005812@darkstar.fourwinds.com> References: <201709111649.v8BGnGTx005812@darkstar.fourwinds.com> Message-ID: On 9/11/17, Jon Steinhart wrote: > > While the choice of UNIX may have played a small part, Sun really nailed > it with the SparcStation I. Sure, they sold it for less than whatever > the DEC equivalent was at the time, but that's because their manufacturing > cost was way less. The SparcStation I pioneered a lot of new manufacturing > technology; it was the first snap-together system. I remember looking at > a tear-down of the DEC and Sun offerings, and the Sun had less than 10% of > the parts of the equivalent DEC system. Methinks that better engineering > won the day. Absolutely. I worked at DEC and had many engineer friends at Apollo, and we were all shaking our heads wondering how Sun got their manufacturing costs so low. Scott McNealy's management style helped, too. Ken Olsen at DEC believed in consensus building; decisions weren't final until everyone bought into them. IMO this led to a lot of (expensive) wrangling and slowed down corporate reaction to market conditions. Scott McNealy believed in the principle of a single decision-maker: "lead, follow, or get out of the way". We at DEC eventually moved to project management that involved a single lead engineer who was responsible for the success of the project, and who was empowered to make decisions when a consensus couldn't be found. But that management style never really caught on, although in my experience the most successful software projects were all organized that way. -Paul W.