Talk:DEC PRISM

message: Too bad this seems to have been ignored for five years. This is an important chapter in history that should be told accurately. The usual problem is that internal corporate projects often do not have reliable sources we can verify, so this seems heavy on personal oral history. It might clarify things if we make explicit what was done where. As I recall there were four DEC "west" labs. Cutler's was commonly called "decwet" since it was in Seatle (that was its uucp name at any rate). DEC SRC was the group headed by Bob Taylor with other former Xerox people. DEC WRL was headed by Forest Baskett formerly of Stanford, and they did Titan and multi-Titan, I think. Steve Borne (one of them) headed the DEC WSE group, which I think did the intirim MIPS DECstations? The others I think were done on the east coast, and am not sure of those (my COI was that I knew some of the west coast people). And should certainly mention the connection between Mica and NT, at least notable people who worked on both. 
Given the extra embolding in the article, is really abot more than just PRISM, but the other RISC projects as well. Not sure if Titan is RISC, so it is more like "1980s DEC research architectures"? Can keep the current title for now, maybe have some redirects or at least references for the others. W Nowicki (talk) 23:07, 6 April 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Follow-up

message: I was there. I did the MIPS SW port originally. This paragraph needs to be fixed:
Frustrated with the growing number of losses to cheaper faster competitive machines, independently, a small skunkworks group in Palo Alto, outside of Central Engineering, focused on workstations and UNIX/Ultrix, entertained the idea of using an off-the-shelf RISC processor to build a new family of workstations. The group carried out due diligence, eventually choosing the MIPS R2000. This group acquired a development machine and prototyped a port of Ultrix to the system. From the initial meetings with MIPS to a prototype machine took only 90 days. Full production of a DEC version could begin as early as January 1989, whereas it would be at least another year before a PRISM based machine would be ready.[7]
It should be something like this:
Frustrated with the growing number of losses to cheaper faster competitive machines, independently, a small skunkworks group in Palo Alto, outside of Central Engineering, focused on workstations and UNIX/Ultrix, entertained the idea of using an off-the-shelf RISC processor to build a new family of workstations. While the group looked at x86, 68K, MIPS, there was no SW solution for them to make a decision. Any choice was possible. Totally independently, the ULTRIX Advanced Development Group in Nahsua, NH obtained 2 MIPS M1000 workstations and did a port of little endian VAX Ultrix to the big endian MIPS M1000. Sometime late in March the plan started to come together with a now working ULTRIX on MIPS HW, it was easy for the marketing and sales side to come up with a plan to build a single board MIPS little endian workstation and get the ULTRIX SW team's backing to port and support the software and the needed apps to make a product.
The group carried out due diligence covering HW and SW plans and support and applications. It all made sense, finally. From the initial meetings with MIPS to a prototype machine took only 90 days. Full production of a DEC version could begin as early as January 1989, whereas it would be at least another year before a PRISM based machine would be ready.[7]
Drrr9999 (talk)Drrr9999
:Neither x86 nor 68k are RISC, so if they considered x86 and 68k, as well as MIPS, it should be "entertained the idea of using an off-the-shelf processor...". Guy Harris (talk) 22:25, 1 May 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  The article is wrong about how MIPS got chosen