[HN Gopher] The VAX (John Mashey, 2005)
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       The VAX (John Mashey, 2005)
        
       Author : TMWNN
       Score  : 15 points
       Date   : 2025-09-25 20:17 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (yarchive.net)
 (TXT) w3m dump (yarchive.net)
        
       | rjsw wrote:
       | Another link for some history from the DEC side is this [1].
       | 
       | [1] https://simh.trailing-edge.com/dsarchive.html
        
       | panick21_ wrote:
       | If you want to learn about the history of VAX chips I very
       | strongly recommend this oral history:
       | 
       | Supnik, Robert oral history
       | 
       | https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10273826...
       | 
       | If you have any interest in VAX or DEC or chip design in the 80s.
       | This is a must watch.
       | 
       | Later also goes into how Alpha was created in Part 2.
        
       | PaulHoule wrote:
       | The trouble with the CISC vs RISC interpretation is that the x86
       | was CISC but trashed all other architectures in the 1990s
       | especially RISC architectures including
       | 
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_Alpha
       | 
       | and Intel's own
       | 
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium
       | 
       | I think it's as simple as a mass market architecture that sells
       | more units can justify more investment than anything that sells
       | fewer units. If DEC had been able to steal market share from the
       | 386 with a VAX based product it might have been able to take the
       | 386's place but from a business perspective they didn't want to
       | cannabalize sales of higher margin minicomputers. The transition
       | from bipolar to CMOS was also difficult because it did mean a
       | regression in performance, IBM addressed this in the 390 by
       | introducing a clustering solution but it was a bold and risky
       | move.
        
         | fredoralive wrote:
         | x86 isn't a VAX though, not all CISC architectures are equally
         | complex (or RISC arch's reduced), and VAX does have a
         | reputation for being a particularly CISCy CISC. We don't really
         | know fully if the same tricks would have worked as well with
         | it.
        
           | TMWNN wrote:
           | And, in fact, Mashey specifically discusses what you
           | identified, and what Houle wrote (rushing to post a gotcha on
           | HN, obviously without having read Mashey's lengthy writings).
        
           | PaulHoule wrote:
           | What I've read was that DEC had a huge amount of regret over
           | the PDP-11 having too small of an address space. It could be
           | that experience led them to think the answer to their
           | problems was to be early to market in the 64-bit age with the
           | Alpha. They did have VMS for the Alpha and later Win NT but
           | high-powered RISC processors were a crowded space in the
           | 1990s.
        
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