On 28 Aug 2019, at 20:57, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

On Wed, Aug 28, 2019 at 1:32 PM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
Perhaps Clem can shed some light on why DEC did a MIPS machine?
I did not work for DEC at the time and obviously, I was not in the room, so this is what I can say I picked up. Supnik would be a better person to ask. That said, some things I do know about the time/and behinds the scene.

As a customer, back in 1992 in the UK: DEC sold us Ultrix DECstations running on the R3000, the R4000 upgrade and then told us the Alpha upgrade would be for peanuts. So we ran this research cluster with one Alpha 3000/600 and two Alpha 3000/400 running OSF/1 T1.0 and the DECstations on Ultrix, compiling everything on Ultrix and "mx"ing into OSF/1 until, with OSF/1 2.0 the "upgrades" showed up and we ended up with a beautiful Alpha cluster which was the envy of the college. They then spread like wildfire when engineering depts tried their code on our cluster…

For us the MIPS DECstations were literally placeholders for the Alphas we'd be getting with the trade-in! One of the DECstations is still with me because it turned out that DEC did not want back the huge stack of DECstations we had piled up for the trade-in!

Arrigo