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A comment on Windows NT 3.1 on Dec Alpha AXP. Parent comment

Re:Windows NT 3.1 on Dec Alpha AXP by Damogran6 on Tuesday October 03, 2023 @10:29AM (#37752458)
The single best x86 computer I've ever used was a Dec Pentium 90...updated eventually to a Pentium II-300. Dec hardware was stupendous. Other systems were (obviously) faster and smaller and probably cooler and more power efficient, but their daughter card implimention of a CPU/RAM upgrade came from their obvious expertise in the Server/Scientific Workstation market with non x-86 architectures.
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Re:Windows NT 3.1 on Dec Alpha AXP by rasz on Tuesday October 03, 2023 @12:27PM (#37754074)
and resulted in project failure. Grant Saviers was responsible for PC division in early nineties.

Oral History of Grant Saviers, part 2 of 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Od830KDrLUU

Oral History of Grant Saviers part 1: http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/201... Oral History of Grant Saviers part 2: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...

>As DEC’s Corporate Vice President of PC Systems and Peripherals from 1990 to 1992 Grant successfully restarted DEC’s PC business from a dormant state and grew revenues to $350M and break-even profitability in 18 months.

@18 minute timestamp - they copied DELL strategy and did pretty good, business was growing and then DEC founder and CEO Ken Olsen decided to kill it. Grant got recruited to lead Adaptec.

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Re:Windows NT 3.1 on Dec Alpha AXP by Damogran6 on Tuesday October 03, 2023 @12:37PM (#37754203)
Awww. Boss had a Digital HiNote that seemed like a pretty nifty laptop compared to the competition at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_HiNote#/media/File:DEC...
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Re:Windows NT 3.1 on Dec Alpha AXP by nxobject on Tuesday October 03, 2023 @03:46PM (#37756628)
What a pity... it seemed like "what should DEC doing in the 90s, and how is it related to DEC's historical identity?" was the question when looking back at their 90's strategy – and it seemed like thoughtfully engineered hardware, even if on a commodity architecture, is one of them.

Even if it wasn't the full stack integration from semiconductor fabrication, to OS and networking, that they were used to.

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Re:Windows NT 3.1 on Dec Alpha AXP by panick21_ on Tuesday October 03, 2023 @12:58PM (#37754533)
Killed by Ken Olson? That doesn't really make sense? They still had the PC division in like 1994 long after Ken was gone? Or am I getting the timeline wrong? Maybe just slowed it.

I haven't yet listened to those Oral histories, but thanks for pointing out another that's focused on DEC.

Love those oral histories. I wish sometimes they were longer and asked some more in detail question about certain things. But I guess you can't keep people for 10h straight.

Edit: Where the hell is the video for Part 1? Doesn't exist?

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Re:Windows NT 3.1 on Dec Alpha AXP by rasz on Tuesday October 03, 2023 @04:53PM (#37757423)
From what I understand Ken killed the idea of using cheap commodity parts and moved PC division hardware design inhouse thus turning profit making venture into huge money sink.

Part 1 doesnt exist in video form :(

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Re:Windows NT 3.1 on Dec Alpha AXP by panick21_ on Tuesday October 03, 2023 @06:20PM (#37758427)
The document I linked in my top-level post suggest that PC division was doing Ok by 1994 but that document is written by an insider who was not directly working on the PC stuff.

> Part 1 doesnt exist in video form :(

Guess I have to go old school and read it :)

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