Re: Why VAX Was the Ultimate CISC and Not RISC

Anton Ertl wrote:

Terje Mathisen <terje.mathisen@tmsw.no> writes:

Anton Ertl wrote:

They did not succeed.  Maybe that's the decisive difference from HP:
They did succeed in the PC market.

>
For some definition of success, i.e they were sufficiently worse at PCs
to later merge with Compaq who was the first significant vendor in the
PC Compatible marketplace.

 Pfeiffer got Compaq into trouble by buying DEC and not being able to
digest it.  HP then bought Compaq and was able to digest all the
parts, leading to a successful PC business (I have no idea how much
Compaq contributed to that and how much HP did) and a successful HPE;
pretty much all of the stuff coming from/through DEC went away (I
think the Tandem legacy may still be identifiable), but maybe they
managed to keep the customers.
 

Columbia beat both of them by half a year or
so, but faded away a bit later.

 I don't think I ever heard about Columbia.  At what did they beat
Compaq and HP?

Columbia created the first ever PC compatibles (at least afaik), I bought a pair (one desktop and one luggable) at the same cost as a single IBM PC in order to develop SW for my father-in-law.
Terje
--
- <Terje.Mathisen at tmsw.no>
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"