From: Bryan J. Smith (b.j.smithieee.org)
Date: Sun May 25 2003 - 08:52:23 CDT

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On Sun, 2003-05-25 at 06:23, Uncle George wrote:
> I'm also not happy with the demise of the 36bit pdp-10, but i'm not
> gonna tell someone on the pdp-10 list that you should move on, its been
> 20 years.

No offense but the Alpha wasn't the PDP (or even the VAX) platform. I'm
sure Intel sure wish it would have just bought Alpha sooner (let alone
never broke from Digital on the Alpha before that) instead of developing
its IA-64 architecture. I mean, Intel just finally got Alpha's FX!32
technology working on IA-64 just the other week so it can run x86
instructions just as good as Alpha could years ago. Rather sad IMHO.
Very sad in fact.

Alpha was _the_ RISC architecture. Digital didn't invent RISC, they
just made it anal (and better).

> I can, of course, run OpenOffice on my 32bit laptop a whole lot better
> than i can for any 64bit machine in the world. There is no "native"
> 64bit port at all. I dont need a 64bit machine just to emulate the 32bit
> intel code.

Ahhh, binary compatibility. Had Alpha been given the proper chance from
Intel, we might all be running Alpha processors today. Especially back
when a 500MHz Alpha 21264 could run x86 software even faster via FX!32
than a 200MHz Pentium Pro could natively. If only Alpha had Intel's
packaging technology in latter years.

--
Bryan J. Smith, E.I. mailto:b.j.smithieee.org http://thebs.org
CCDA/CCNA CIWSA/MCIWA LPIC2/RHCE MCSA http://thebs.org/certs.pdf
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