Re: [TUHS] Why did PDPs become so popular?

On 12/29/2017 3:04 AM, Kevin Bowling wrote: I worked in the Computer Science Dept. at UC Berkeley in the 1990s when Richard Sites, the chief architect of the Alpha, gave a talk describing the Alpha. I remember him saying that there was nothing out there from any other vendor that would be able to compete with the Alpha for the next 10 years (I'm pretty sure he said 10 years but it might have been longer). Because I was the system manager for the Sequoia 2000 project, DEC's big external research project after Project Athena, I got the first Alpha delivered to UC Berkeley. I remember it being quite fast, although I don't recall any specific benchmarks. The OS (OSF/1) was fairly primitive as first and didn't even support multiple processor systems. We were able to port Postgres to it fairly quickly in spite of various issues related to the 64-bit Alpha architecture. In fact, the Postgres group was using Alpha desktops when SQL was added to Postgres. As nice as the Alphas were, I don't recall any compelling reason we would have used them if we had to pay for them. In fact, at the same time Mike Stonebraker and I wrote a grant proposal to Sun to get a couple of SparcStation 10s to use to port Postgres to Solaris. The SparcStations were just as nice to use as the Alphas. DEC's later demise was quite sad to me, since before joining UC Berkeley I had been a VAX/VMS person. DEC did a great job supporting Project Sequoia 2000, and they were very generous with both their hardware and money. Judging from Sites' presentation, they thought they were going to win. Jon Forrest