Fairchild 944x

Chuck Guzis wrote: They tried to sell it, they just weren't good at it. They didn't want small customers, though they did send me the data sheets and such. They wanted big customers, but they didn't want big customers that would produce general-purpose computers that would compete with low-end Nova minis. I suppose they just wanted embedded designs, but everyone was using the 8080, 6800, etc. for those. For most embedded systems there was no obvious benefit to using a slow, expensive MicroNova instead. DEC wasn't much better at selling their microprocessors either. They got few outside design wins for the T11 and J11 processors, and the pricing wasn't competitive. Same thing years later with the Alpha. The marketing people bragged about how it outperformed the x86 and that the whole world would move to Alpha, but the price/performance ratio was substantially worse than that of the x86, so the only significant external design wins were for specialized systems that needed the highest possible uniprocessor performance.