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i find the alpha weirdly uninteresting in practice, since it was so influential that the cooler parts of it are now ubiquitous anyway. compare e.g. the VAX which looks pretty insane by todays standards.
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Jan 11, 2022 16:25
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getting that fixed to enable the one real usecase, sgx, just in time for the deprecation of sgx.
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Jan 16, 2022 13:30
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intel (and to some extent microsoft) were geniuses for realizing just how much real value exists in "legacy" software, at every stage dragging every little thing along keeping peoples and businesses things ticking along. which on the theme of the thread is interesting, because as great as the alpha was, maybe the world would have looked really different if dec had done a pentium pro for vax, or motorola had done a pentium pro for the 68k. afaik there is no real reason it wasn't perfectly doable, dec had some of the pieces already in the rather performant nvax, and the 68k had different challenges than x86 but i don't see that they were worse.
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Jan 16, 2022 22:48
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Kazinsal posted:I've never met the guy but DEC folks who worked with him said he thought the entire I/O and userspace processes/daemons model of Unix was obsolete before it even left Bell Labs and it held back small-scale computing for years, and a book that interviewed some folks who worked on NT with him described him as considering Unix system design as his Moriarty a la Sherlock Holmes as well as considering it "a junk operating system designed by a committee of PhDs". steve ballmer pretty much got him on board by telling him it was a chance to write a microcomputer OS that scaled up to servers and minicomputing that would displace Unix. he doesn't do interviews really so it's hard to get first-hand accounts from the man iirc he was also the architect for the os plumbing of azure, and it really should have been a lot easier to imagine a microsoft project that goes "lets make aws except on windows" to be a complete trashfire horrorshow. especially in the era the initial work was done. would be really interesting to hear more of what he has to say.
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Feb 1, 2022 11:55
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presumably it is worth something but really shouldn't be, at least not enough to offset even the ecological cost of a 4 hour roundtrip drive.
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Feb 2, 2022 12:56
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