by lproven | 2025-04-04 15:58:59+00:00
Let me try to recap a fairer version...

> Back in the late 1970s Dave Cutler and his team create VMS at DEC as the next generation operating system for DEC's new flagship product, the VAX minicomputer.

Not exactly.

In the '60s DEC made several of the leading minicomputers. One was a 16-bit box, the PDP-11, a critical machine in the history of Unix as the first new platform it was ported to.

(It was written on an 18-bit DEC mini, the PDP-7. Part of the reason that the PDP-11 got big was that the industry was moving to 8-bit bytes and 16-bit words.)

The VAX was the 32-bit extended version of the PDP-11. It added virtual memory: VAX stands for Virtual Address Extension.

Cutler wrote one of the most successful PDP-11 OSes, RSX-11. He was famously much faster than rival teams, so got the job of writing a 32-bit OS for the new 32-bit machine.

> VMS is good by all accounts and was a successful product, but Unix goes on to dominate the minicomputer and emerging server market for the next decade.

Not really. VMS 1.0 was 1977. Its clustering is still the best-of-breed today, able to present multiple heterogenous machines (VAX, Alpha, Itanium and x86-64) as a single virtual host on the network, with multiple nodes sharing drives, with nodes able to join and leave while the cluster stays up. Uptimes in decades are normal with OS upgrades happening in that time.

DEC enjoyed 10-15yr of dominance in its sector before Unix started to become much of a threat. The first SUN workstation wasn't for 5 years yet. The first SPARC not for another 12yr.

> Then in the 1990s DEC goes out of business

Nope nope nope.

Cutler proposes a plan: a successor to the VAX, a 32-bit RISC chip (PRISM), and a successor to VMS, a multi-personality OS (MICA) to run on it.

DEC says no. It does not believe that microcomputers and Unix are threats, and it spends $ _billions_ on VAX 9000, a series of mainframe-class VAX machines. By the time they eventually ship, the performance is uncompetitive.

Mind you while it's doing this it's selling tons of VAXes including high-end workstations; I bought several and ran clusters of them.

Microsoft headhunts Cutler and his core team with him. It gives him OS/2 3.0 to finish, the portable (CPU-independent) version. They built it on Intel's next-gen RISC chip, i860: the x86 times ten. Codename: N-10. The OS is renamed OS/2 NT for N-Ten.

Note: officially denied now, yes, I am fully aware. Don't believe everything you hear.

Cutler implements his planned MICA multi-personality OS, able to emulate other OSes at kernel level, as NT. Most OS/2 stuff is junked but at launch it can format and use OS/2 HPFS disks and run OS/2 text-mode binaries, and an optional add-on to run Presentation Manager GUI apps is available.

DEC rescues PRISM, upgrades it to 64-bit, and calls it Alpha. Fastest CPU in the industry and the first 64-bit single-chip processor. Runs Unix, VMS, and Windows NT. First non-x86 chip to get Linux ported to it.

DEC also uses this experience to design the first superscalar ARM, called StrongARM.

DEC also gets a very sweet deal on NT for Alpha; the rumour is that DEC has proof that Cutler used MICA code in NT and has MS over a barrel.

DEC remains a major industry force. It also makes networking kit, printers, HDD and tape drives, Ethernet chipsets, PCs -- it's almost a one-stop shop. You can built an entire enterprise network entirely from DEC kit from the screens to the keyboards to the Ethernet switches. I did.

> sells VMS to Compaq, but not before porting it to their doomed Alpha CPU architecture.

Way off. Not even close.

DEC's lost MICA project, now called Windows NT, eats into its revenues. It loses market share to cheap x86 PCs and an OS based on a DEC design.

Compaq buys DEC. It's too big to digest and Compaq gets in trouble.

> Then in 2000s Compaq goes out of business and gets acquired by HP, and together they port VMS to the doomed Itanium CPU architecture.

Not really, no.

Cash-rich HP, which has lots of experience with managing non-x86 lines, acquires one of its biggest competitors in the x86 space, which has zero such experience.

HP buys Compaq. HP has its own RISC chip, its own Unix, its own fault-tolerant systems, all kinds of legacy stuff. It is quite used to killing old product lines. It also has a high-end enterprise email server that is compatible with MS Exchange.

HP makes good money from its partnership with MS, though.

So, HP kills HP OpenMail and sells the IP to Samsung, trades Alpha to Intel in return for killing its RISC chip... it goes all-in on MS and being the premium enterprise MS partner. Anything that rivals anything from Intel or Microsoft, HP kills.

HP works with Intel to make an EPIC chip that it tells customers will replace its PA-RISC.

HP merges the surviving DEC enterprise (non-x86) kit into its enterprise lines.

It announces it's killing VMS.

I wrote this: https://www.theregister.com/2013/06/10/openvms_death_notice/

There is a big customer outcry.

> In 2014, a shop called VMS Software Inc (VSI) strikes some kind of deal with HP where they get to develop and support new versions of VMS while older versions continue to belong to HP. As part of this, they finally announce an x86-64 port. This port first sees the light of day in 2020.

HP spins off VMS to a new company.

https://www.theregister.com/2014/07/31/openvms_spared/

As there is no new Alpha or Itanium kit, the new company's proposition is to help customers nurse VMS on Alpha or Itanium until it has an x86-64 VMS.

It delivers this by 2020.