Fairchild 944x

[Paul_Koning at Dell.com]

>Contrast that with the sales approach by Intel, who would sell to you 
>if they could hear the sound of change jingling in your pocket.  I 
>could count on regular phone calls, literature and free lunches by 
>the local Intel sales guy--and we were definitely small potatoes.  I 
>think Intel understood the idea of an architectural "lock-in" better 
>than DG or DEC, who apparently didn't think that principle applied to 
>microprocessors.

I don't know about DG, but I think that DEC had more basic issues than lack of understanding of "lock-in".  Come to think of it, they did understand that well enough -- for computers, not chips.

DEC had microprocessors all right, but they were really just a way to build computers.  (The T11 is perhaps an exception; I sometimes wonder how that came about.)  So they made plenty of use of them internally, but the notion of selling them to outsiders just didn't compute.

Another consideration is that DEC didn't take sales seriously in any setting -- witness the fact that they had the only sales force in recorded history that wasn't paid commission.

As for the lack of success of Alpha in competing with x86, the above are good reasons, and another one would be the fact that by then it was too late for a new general purpose architecture.  Now if Alpha had been positioned as an embedded architecture, it might have succeeded (taking from MIPS) -- except that it probably was too fast for most embedded applications.

	paul