[HECnet] NT 4 on AlphaServer es40

[Paul_Koning at Dell.com]

On Feb 11, 2013, at 4:38 PM, Mark Benson wrote:


On 11 Feb 2013, at 21:02, Dave McGuire wrote:

You know DEC, they loved supporting legacy products almost into oblivion.

Yes, for GOOD products

As much as I'd like to agree, it didn't necessarily work that way round. It was more a case of 'is someone important still using this? Then we best not ditch them or it'll look awfully bad... and they'll go and buy an IBM/DataGeneral/etc.' :)

Not even that.   For example, shortly after the 11/780 was announced, there was a definite (and, as I recall, explicitly stated) push to drop all PDP-11 support ASAP.

For that matter, when IAS was announced, RSTS customers were told that IAS was the future and they should move there right away.   Not long after that, IAS was recognized for the boat anchor it was, and it remained an obscure niche product.

So DEC definitely had a history of angering customers by attempting to drop support for products that were very much alive and in some cases superior to the alleged replacement.

Of course, they sometimes did get it right, as in the example of TRAX... :-)

	paul