From: mfraioli@grebyn.com (Marc Fraioli)
Subject: Re: Tidbits 01/06/93
Organization: Grebyn Timesharing
Date: Sat, 9 Jan 1993 17:55:53 GMT

In article <1iijajINNksu@network.ucsd.edu> mbk@lyapunov.ucsd.edu (Matt Kennel) writes:
>mfraioli@grebyn.com (Marc Fraioli) writes:
>: models of Alpha-based machines they were showing, NT runs on only one of
>: them, the low-end EISA bus machine.  All other Alpha models use DEC's
>: TurboChannel bus, and NT DOES NOT RUN ON THEM.  I asked the DEC
>: representatives there about this, and they were very clear on it.  They
>: said that if initial reaction to NT on Alpha was positive, they would
>: consider porting it to their actual workstations in addition to their
>: PCs, but this is by no means certain.  I was also told that there were
>: no plans at all to put NT on any of their multi-processing servers and
>: data centers-- NT's vaunted multi-procsessing abilities will not be
>: exploited on Alpha hardware any time in the near future.  In the Q&A
>: sessions that I attended on the future of Alpha computing, most of the
>: questions were about VMS, interestingly enough.  Admittedly they had a
>: separate session specifically for NT, and it was well-attended, and this
>: may have drawn off NT-specific questions from the other sessions.
>: 
>: So in sum, Digital will be offering NT initially only on their PCs,
>: including Intel and Alpha based PCs, but not on their workstations or
>: servers, which will be Unix or VMS only for at least the next year or
>: two.   The Alpha PC costs ~$7,000, and according to DEC will provide
>: about 5 times the performance running NT of a 486/50.  They claim about
>: 2.5 times the performance of Pentium, although this is obviously hard to
>: be sure about.  It is obviously only for very high-end PC users, and
>: those are really pretty rare.  The whole NT/Alpha combo didn't look too
>: impressive to me.
>
>What this means is that DEC won't allow the Rest of Us to buy cheap Alpha
>machines and run UNIX.
>
>The unforunate thing is that NT is not *so* much worse than UNIX that they'd
>be really forced to do so, and instead the users will switch and put
>up with it.
>
>Why did UNIX become so popular?  Because it runs on the fastest machines
>for the money.
>
>What seems likely is that the computer companies will "segment" the market
>(to increase their profit) offering their cheapest computers (best 
>price/performance) as NT only, and forcing UNIX users to pay more $$, both
>in hardware and software, even there is no good technical reason for
>this.
>
>In the best of all possible worlds, the advent of NT will bring UNIX
>s/w prices down to those of PC's because of direct competition, but I'm
>not so confident, as it's in no "big players" financial interest.
>
>UNIX software shops want an "upscale" market so they can continue
>to charge their 2x higher prices for the identical software they can port
>for NT easily.
>
>Microsoft doesn't want cheap UNIX software because then maybe people
>would buy UNIX for their PC's instead of NT.
>
Actually, I left out one point that responds to exactly this from the
Digital Open House-- Digital WILL be porting both their OSF/1 Unix and
VMS to the Alpha PC.  The only thing in question is whether they will
port NT to the higher-end hardware.  So DEC is maintaining the tradition
of keeping Unix on the best price/performance hardware.  Frankly I am
very enthusiastic about DEC's role in Unix/Open Systems for the future,
but since this is a Windows group, I hadn't discussed it in my original
post.  But since it came up...:-)

-- 
Marc Fraioli
mfraioli@grebyn.com	        	(So I'm a minimalist...)