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From: bobw@beverage.Eng.Sun.COM (Robert Weiler)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: DEC RISC Architecture?
Message-ID: <1353@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM>
Date: 12 Oct 90 22:01:25 GMT
References: <4462@trantor.harris-atd.com> <107038@convex.convex.com> <15007@hydra.gatech.EDU> <0093E081.85D1F940@KING.ENG.UMD.EDU>
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In article <0093E081.85D1F940@KING.ENG.UMD.EDU> sysmgr@KING.ENG.UMD.EDU (Doug Mohney) writes:
{Dec maybe porting VMS to RISC...}
>They are also working on a "portable" VMS written in C, but I'm not so sure
>if they are committed to port it to the MIPS machines. That would mean they
>would have difficulty selling VAX hardware, because the price/performance
>between VAX hardware and MIPS hardware is different by a factor of 2-3.

I have never quite understood this line of reasoning which, unfortunately,
was also prevelant at my previous place of employment. People buy a lot
of VAX/VMS machines *despite* the fact that the price performance is
very poor compared to almost any UNIX/RISC box, even the ones sold by DEC.
Therefore the obvious conclusion is that what these people are really
buying is VMS and it is worth a lot of money to them. So the proper
equation is

	$(MIPS box + VMS) == $(VAX + VMS)

DEC should be very happy with this because the machine costs them
the same amount to build whether it comes with VMS or UNIX, so all of
the extra dollars are profit. Ask Bill Gates. :-)

Of course, you lose binary compatibility, so until the third party
catalog is ported (and it may never be), the system isn't really
worth anything. And that's a hard problem to get around.

bob.

Disclaimer: I kind of doubt that Sun has an opinion about this, and even
	if they do, it is certainly unrelated to mine.