Allison> One of the interesting aspects is the collision of Allison> technology at that point in time. People that thought they Allison> needed a bigger meaner VAX got it with the 9000. However in Allison> the same timeframe there was increased demand for smaller Allison> ligher VAXen and use more of them. What was happening in Allison> the background was the speed/power product of CMOS was Allison> getting better and ECL (ECL100k) was was poor in the Allison> density/power product. True. Although interestingly the reason that is true is because the ECL chip builders never built anything other than SSI parts with ECL. DEC Research in Palo Alto did a neat project to do VLSI ECL, which no one had ever done. It turns out that ECL is very efficient and compact for many logic functions if you use the right circuits. The WRL team designed its own design tools because nothing existed to do the job. They actually did build a MIPS processor that way that ran at a half GHz or so (back in 1992) and were going to do a GHz Alpha. They almost did. What killed the project is that all the ECL foundries kept closing down. The design tools actually allowed switching to another fab with different design rules, but at some point they ran out of fabs. They also did some very slick work to handle 100 watt chips, something that Intel later made routine (some years after DEC was ridiculed for building 100 watt Alphas). Allison> So while the 9000 was the fastest Allison> vax.. for a while the later CMOS versions was very close and Allison> a smaller plus cheaper was it. Add to that that a Allison> Multiprocessor VAX using chip technology was not only Allison> practical and well supported it offered a better bang for Allison> the buck. If that weren't enough the same ugly dragon that Allison> helped kill Jupiter (PDP-10) was back to haunt VAX. At some Allison> point in the near future it was clear that 32bits no matter Allison> how fast was going to be inefficient and 64bits was a very Allison> viable answer, that begat Alpha. Who'd have though in 1987 Allison> that a gigabyte was not enough and terabytes were only a few Allison> years away. Too bad that DEC canceled two perfectly good RISC architectures before finally deciding to ship RISC in the guise of Alpha (and, for a while, MIPS because they had canceled their two earlier internal efforts that were better). paul