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Comment by mega_dingus | Hacker News Reader

DEC's relationship with MS was fascinating

DEC sued MS due to Cutler's contribution to NT. DEC thought they could sue themselves into MS's good graces. They had embroidered polo shirts saying "Strategic Relationship", and saw several employees wearing them, and the phrase was repeated often

DEC couldn't figure out why Office performed worse on Alpha than x86. They sent an employee to MS, only to find MS had a single build server stashed under some desk. MS was compiling Office with -O0, obviously doing the absolute bare minimum to check a box and move on with their lives.

Source: I'm a former DEC employee

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Fascinating. Dave over at Dave's Garage on YouTube talks about having a dec I believe -- if what you heard is true I wonder if it was the sole machine you're talking about. Maybe he can shed some light from the other side (Microsoft)

IIRC - he mentioned that someone _else_ had a DEC machine, and actually used it as their dev box. The dev with the DEC box person developed the kernel panic code, aka the blue screen of death - and blue was chosen because that's the default screen colour when the DEC box is turned on. The idea was to reset the colour to the default before printing the kernel panic message.

So while DEC NT is sort of a footnote, it did have this pretty profound influence : )

Windows 3.x's fatal exception screens were also blue.

Indeed; I think Windows 2.0 even had it. The story might sound plausible until the holes are poked in the hypothesis.

So were the color schemes on many 8-bit computers of the '80s, such as Ataris and Commodores.

This is a bit of a game of telephone - NT Alpha shipped after NT 3.1 (i386 & Mips) and the port was done almost entirely by DEC. The blue screen preceded the Alpha and was really based on the color scheme from the firmware on the Mips workstation which Microsoft built internally. And, of course, the legendary SlickEdit, which was one of the original editors available on Win32.

After NT 3.1, Microsoft assumed primary responsibility for NT Alpha, although there were also some great people at DECWest still involved.

source: me, I'm the 'someone _else_' who owned all the Alpha stuff at Microsoft.

I was running OpenVMS on VAX machines in that era. I couldn’t figure out why DEC wanted NT, a single user operating system, for their mini computers. It made no sense to me. As an aside I had an OpenVMS gig as recently as 2020. It was fun to dust off my old DCL skills.

I have an Alpha here with OpenVMS! It's fun to play around with. VMS was the first multi-user system I had access to, way back when I was a teenager in the late 80's.

> I couldn’t figure out why DEC wanted NT, a single user operating system, for their mini computers.

When did you figure out that NT wasn't a single user operating system?

NT's support for multiplexed interactive user sessions is piss-poor and has always come with a CAL restriction that was _absurd_. To this day there's no real "multiuser on consoles". (Yes yes, Citrix, rdp, Powershell Remoting, OpenSSH: compare those with X and, I guess, also SSH, and they suck.)

I'm not sure what the requirement for purchasing CALs has to do with whether an OS is multi-user or not. I have administered or been a user of interactive remote NT user session systems going back to beta testing the initial release of WinFrame in the mid 90's. Although worlds better today, I would not have called it pisspoor even then. Today RDS is much more capable than X on a unix system.

As someone else in that space in the mid 90s I would agree that it was pretty remarkable nearly 30 years ago, especially considering the competition.

As far as I know NT 4 was not able to have 2 users logged on at the same time. So it was not a multiuser system.

RDP is great. It works fluidly over 56k modems. X “sucks” as it could never do that.

This argument works both ways.

False, I've done remote XDMCP in the early 2000s and it worked well on dial up.

A request for an official answer on CALs for Microsofts' SSH port is about to turn 6 years old:

https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH/issues/926

While MS licensing is shitty, there is nothing ambigous there, it's the same as everything else there, be it RDP, SMB or Apache.

If you use the User CAL model then any user can have any amount of connections from any amount of devices used by the same user.

If you have 100 employees using SSH (or Apache or whatever) - you need to license 100 User CALs.

Windows supports much richer remote access than anything built on X. I can log in using standard graphical login, my keyboard layouts carry over, audio is transparently handled, the screen size isn't tied to the existence of a remote monitor and 3d acceleration just works. And all that works out of the box with no setup necessary other than enabling it.

On Linux, the only workflow I could get working was to use x11vnc to control an existing local session. To log in, I have to run x11vnc as root, pass it some magic cookie (I have no idea what that is still, but some magic incantation from SO did the trick), then once I log in, the running x11vnc dies, and I have to restart it as a regular user to control the session I just authenticated.

you've never seen remote X, it was a decade ahead of RDP

You can just "ssh -X" into your remote server, then run an app. SSH will configure X authentication for you (the "magic cookie stuff") and set up the "DISPLAY" environment variable to forward X11 connections over an encrypted tunnel. The app will display on your local desktop. It will even work on a Mac, if you install XQuartz.

i'd probably blame the compiler. It's a weird mess of DEC objects being glued together to run on NT (Like the MIPS/PPC ones too). And if you wanted to make anything that for sure ran on all CPU type's you'd build /Od. Doing /O2 or /Ox was a recipe to run nowhere.

The real shame is that 64bit beta compiler does such a substantially better job on the Alpha, but like everything else once everything started to gel, it suddenly imploded.

Compiler was definitely somewhat to blame. I was on the C/C++ team at the time, and C++ was definitely an afterthought on the existing C frontend, of a big 3-stage compiler

I was on Digital UNIX so I didn't deal with VMS or Windows much. But Digital UNIX couldn't get out of their way with object file formats (COFF vs ELF and whatever else), on top of the compiler inefficiencies

A recipe for disaster when the MS company employee doesn't want to do it in the first place, and you give them an artisan product that's hard to use properly

damn so many potential questions, but I don't know if you can answer any as I know most people that were in those pivotal years are so cagey about it.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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?

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 :(

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 :)

Yeah that relationship is strange. Seems to me they should have used that Cutler/MICA thing to make a huge amount of money and help their PC division.

Not sure exactly what that 'Strategic Relationship' bought them. Seems to me all the companies making partnerships with Microsoft got shafted. Microsoft were always somehow able to use getting sued into making profitable deals for them in the long run. Because most companies didn't want to drive home the dagger, but rather get a few concessions on some kind of partnership.

Not sure if this is true, but Microsoft(or Cutler) allegedly stole MICA source code and used it NT, which was part of that lawsuit.

https://techmonitor.ai/technology/dec_forced_microsoft_into_...

Former VMS user here. The whole "affinity" program that DEC keep pushing just seemed confused and pointless. I think by the time DEC management realized that they had "played themselves" it was too late. And then the Itanium thing happened.

> And then the Itanium thing happened.

Its still funny to me how Itanium by its announcement basically killed or significantly delayed most other architectures only to turn out to be a dog.

Context is important.

All of those competing architectures were becoming prohibitively expensive to enhance.

Alpha never paid for itself, ever, the market share was too small. POWER and SPARC had multiple failed projects with enormous capital costs. MIPS hit a performance dead-end with such low market share SGI saw no way to rebuild. HPPA was bleeding HP dry.

Itanium may have hastened their demise but all of these archs had the same core problems with investment returns. The writing was on the wall, and Intel was offering something people desperately wanted. (Unfortunately for everyone involved, it did not pan out.)

I that understand that context. But even so.

POWER and SPARC were continue to be developed. And its hard to argue that either of them should have given up on their architecture. POWER is still developed. It probably made sense for Sun to stop working on SPARC eventually but not when Itanium was announced. Sun problem was just that they spend quite a bit of money, they were just never actually very good at designing processors.

SGI was the most aggressive on telling everybody that Itanium would be the future. And they paid for that. They massively delayed MIPS upgrades (only to then start it again once they realized it would take a while for Itanium to come to the market). For a while after this they still made their money on MIPS and all their attempts to push Itanium pretty much fell flat. So arguable it was smart for them to plan to eventually dump MIPS but now how and when they tried to do it (Also I don't disagree that MIPS was a deadend).

The deal HP got would have been fantastic if Intel had adopted PA-RISC 64-bit instead of Itanium. Given what happened HP wasn't really competitive with Sun 64-bit SMP servers and Sun made a killing on those things before the bubble. Once they bought Compaq and for a while were selling SMP servers based on Alpha.

HP really should have continued to push Alpha after the bought Compaq. The already had VMS ported to Alpha and a large captured base willing to pay a little extra. They aggressively ported VMS to Itanium and thanks to the insane deal they made Intel had to manufacture them processors for a decade+.

They are a large enough company and Alpha next few version had the chance to be really great, with things advanced vector extension and they had basically had the best processor team in the world.

So yes, it was correct that all these companies wanted to drop their development cost, but doing so before you know really about Itanium and how good it was, that's questionable and messed up all the strategies. There was just an assumption that Itanium was gone be amazing. Granted, VLIW processors were all the hype. Sun also waste a bunch of money on VLIW processor technology in the 90s and unlike HP, they didn't it on Intel.

Gordan Bell tried to hook up Alpha with Intel and make Alpha the 64-bit architecture that Intel went with. That would have been quite a different history. But for various reasons this didn't happen, and instead Intel went with HP and their next generation VLIW idea.

P.S: It would have been pretty smart of Sun went in on Alpha in 1992, then they could have saved on development threw out the 90s. DEC had built up a huge fabs to handle Alpha but almost nobody bought it. They were really looking for a high value costumer and couldn't find one.

Edit: > (Unfortunately for everyone involved, it did not pan out.)

Well it wasn't unfortunate for everybody. Sun made quite a bit of money for a few more years with SPARC. And so did IBM with Power. I think those two companies were happy with the Itanium failure.

I remember when Rick Belluzzo became CEO at SGI. He immediately started pushing Windows NT and Itanium abandoning IRIX and MIPS. A lot of people wondered why and it seemed like he was on the Microsoft payroll. Then he left after about 1.5 years in 1999 to join Microsoft. The whole thing still seems fishy to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Belluzzo

He pushed the same thing at HP as well. And the left Microsoft soon after as well.

I think its more like that he was brought in by the board because those were his opinions.

The board was sick of paying for development of MIPS and IRIX. The believed their future was massive multicore Itanium Windows IT systems. And because they wouldn't do any of the development but would make the same kind of profits, they would just print money.

This of course backfired in a whole bunch of different ways.

Sun's last successful SPARC project was the UltraSPARC II, in 1997. Their subsequent projects, like "Rock" and "Niagara," were disasters. (USIII and USIV were little more than core shrinks of USII)

If Sun had given up the day Itanium was announced, they mighta come out ahead!

Well technically successful maybe. But lots of people still bought their serves even after the bubble. And those server were expensive with good margin.

Giving up instantly when Itanium was announced would have just made them a company that waste a lot of money a lot of money on porting things to Itanium (and Sun had quite a lot of software that's not exactly easy to port). Only to not have a 64-bit system to build servers from. Essentially at best offering good x86 32-bit servers for the next couple years.

To be sure x86 workstations and servers should have been a big part of their strategy already in the late 90s. But that's not the same as adopting Itanium.

SGI did exactly what you suggest, give up on their chips and OS. This was terrible choice. Because Itanium was very late they had to restart MIPS development and were not able catch back up. Their Itanium products all didn't sell well even when they finally arrived.

SGI was already moribund in 1997. Executives made a conscious choice to pivot. It didn't work out, but it is real hard for me to believe they could have done better with a redoubled focus on MIPS development they could not afford.

Yeah, in 1996 SGI bought Cray for $740 million. They got CrayLink/NumaLink, but also a big 64way SMP SPARC machine, which they sold to Sun for "significantly less than $100 million." Which became the Sun E10K, which made a lot of money.[0]

Then a bunch of the graphics people (who did the GPU for the Nintendo 64) went to found ArtX [1], which got bought by ATI.

There was also the ill-fated Fahrenheit project.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/2002/05/06/0506sun.html#703713c16a5e [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArtX

Pretty sure 'CrayLink' was actually developed by SGI and just branded 'Cray'.

My bad; from wikipedia.. Looks like this[0] was considered NumaLink v1. Hooking up 16 SGI Iris'

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_DASH

At least this proves that their marketing was successful :)

They were forced to redouble on MIPS because Itanium was so late anyway. And even after Itanium came out making products around it took a while.

And I'm not saying not reacting to Itanium means go all in on your existing ISA and your existing business model. That wasn't my argument.

My argument was don't go all out on everything that currently makes you money and your costumers expect for a totally unproven architecture that even if it works out means that you are just gone be a commodity provider with commodity software. Something totally outside of the whole history of Silicon graphics.

They also didn't really invest in a next-generation graphics system. Just a rehash of the InfiniteReality.

SGI also did have X86 workstations, first with a proprietary SGI chipset that required as special HAL for NT/2K, and then just a standard PC workstation.

I wonder how much of that was each one being largely one-vendor operations. Even high-margin markets like servers and HPC can't compete with selling a billion cheap chips for white-boxes.

If there had been an "Alpha Inc" akin to the ARM Ltd model, I wonder if the platform could have survived longer. It might be able to tap firms that want to play in the high end market, but weren't interested in buying from a direct competitor (picturing those big beige Dell Poweredge PII cubes, but with Alphas in them), or they might have gotten a better deal out of stuff like AMD using the EV6 bus for the Athlon.

Aside from that, I suspect there was a significant aspect of vapourware to the Itanium strategy. Peak Intel had great manufacturing process and an endless bankroll; it was easy to assume that they'd deliver a product that would be impossible to compete with, may as well give up on another architecture. By the time the Itanium product shipped and everyone saw what a lemon it is, it was too late to reallocate the resources and make up for years of lost effort.

Actually there had been an "Alpha Inc": https://techmonitor.ai/technology/alpha_processor_inc_offici...

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