Re: is Vax addressing sane today

On 10/1/24 12:26, Anton Ertl wrote:

Michael S <already5chosen@yahoo.com> writes:

On Tue, 1 Oct 2024 10:12 +0100 (BST)
jgd@cix.co.uk (John Dallman) wrote:

PowerPC did for a while, but the company interested in NT on PowerPC
was IBM, and their hardware prices were a /lot/ higher than x86
prices. They didn't see that as a problem, but all the potential
customers did.

 The ideas of ARC (MIPS) and PowerPC (which was not just IBM) was that
they would succeed the IA-32-based PC.  Given the assumed (and, around
1990, actual) performance superiority of RISCs over IA-32, this looked
plausible.  However, even with Alpha, which was often superior in
performance throughout the 1990s, and for which there were cheap
offerings (but without performance edge; e.g., I once was playing with
the idea of buying a 21164PC-based PC164SX system, where the CPU+board
(with 1MB L2 cache) cost ATS 6000 (~EUR 440) in 1998; but I went with
a K6-2, because I played some DOS games:-).  The cheap 164SX offer may have
been a clearance sale, however.
 

My impression at the time was given the ppc was 1/3 the cost of the intel processors at the time that they would have destroyed Intel.
OS2 for the ppc was a no show and IBM didn't believe AIX for ppc
would be popular enough so they canned it.  Which kind of left
Apple holding the bag because I believe the sell to Apple was
the ppc was going to be produced in such volume that unit
prices would have dropped considerably.  One of the many stories
of IBM snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
Joe Seigh