End of the Alpha CPU (was: IBM Buys Rational for $2.1Billion!)

[Jerry Feldman]

DEC always had a problem with both marketing and sales. As a former DEC 
customer, we tried to buy a VAX 11/780 once, and could not get a sales 
person to return our calls let alone visit our office in Burlington (2 
miles from Dec's Burlington sales office).
There were some people like Clem Cole who pushed for DEC and later Compaq 
to come out with a low cost Alpha.
IMHO, Tru64 Unix was one of the better Unix systems.  
bscott at ntisys.com wrote:

>   Even when DEC was still DEC, the Alpha was neglected.  Oh, sure, it had a
> great engineering team, but one could only obtain them through DEC's sales
> organization.  DEC sales often gave me the impression that they would rather
> I bought from the competition.  And there was no real marketing of the Alpha
> at all.  Intel's greatest idea ever was their "Intel Inside" campaign.  You
> could sit a retarded monkey from the African interior in front of a TV, and
> within a week, it would recognize the "Intel Inside" jingle.  Alpha might as
> well be a brand of goat cheese for all the marketing DEC did for it.
-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
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