26 Aug
2006
26 Aug
'06
3:23 p.m.
The story is AXP was made up after they realized they couldn't trademark
Alpha. They needed something to add to the generic word to make it
register-able.
The Electro Vlassic dates back to a DEC engineering report on the Light
Emitting Pickle. (there used to be a pdf of a research report out of DEC's
Western Research Lab.
EV was probably a nod to the start was not to build a new RISC chip per se
-- but to find something to extend the Vax lifespan.
Course, it's pretty much common talk that AXP was used in the name because
the chip was "Almost eXactly Prism" which was an architecture that was
cancelled earlier at DEC...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_PRISM
Bill
On 8/26/06, Scott Quinn <compoobah at valleyimplants.com> wrote:
Ray wrote:
The Alpha chips were coded with EV - as in
Electro Vlassic. :-)
That is one of those things, like VME, where the "real meaning" is
kept secret. There are several hypotheses, the other one that makes sense
is that it stands for Extended VAX (which, when you trace it out, means
Extended Virtual Address Extension [of the PDP-11], so there's still a
little bit of PDP
in HP/DEC (until October...)
AXP however is known to mean nothing.
(could be a place shifting of something, e.g. VAX -> (v)AX[p]