Nicholas Geovanis wrote:
On Sun, Mar 14, 2021, 1:50 PM Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>
wrote:
...
FWIW And MIPS was there even a bit earlier with their R4000 (tho the
software support for it only appeared some years later: they first
wanted to have an installed base to which to deploy the software), which
I believe was the first 64bit microprocessor.
And the demise of the DEC Alpha was quite unfortunate. It was super-fast
and OSF/1 was rock-solid. But DEC lost the competitive bid on that project
and Sequent/Dynix, based on hundreds of 486 CPUs, won it. Now owned by IBM
and deep-sixed: They really bought the customer base instead.
i wondered what happened to them, but didn't look into it.
when the university got rid of the mainframe we switched to
Sequent machines. the two cabinets replaced the entire
floor of Univac hardware (and all the AC and power costs).
the other nice thing was not listening to those printers
hammering away.