On Sat, 11 Jan 2003, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:

> I can't fathom the decision making at HP, jumping on Itanic.

Very simple. The decision was made years ago, long before HP owned or
could have conceivably owned the Alpha CPU. (That they got it all was an
accidental side effect of the Compaq purchase anyway; they would have
bought Compaq just as happily without the Alpha included.)

And it was fairly reasonable decision at the time. HP decided they
didn't want to continue to pony up the (very expensive) development
costs for their own PA-RISC CPUs, and they couldn't very well go to one
of their main competitors (DEC) for a CPU. Intel had proven that they
could design reasonably good, fast, cheap CPUs, and they didn't compete
with HP in the workstation market.

You could argue that the Compaq purchase gave them the chance to switch
course and go with the Alpha rather than the Itanic, but I guess that
they felt that the combination of cost, political fallout, and the risk
to their substantial x86 business with Intel would have made the whole
thing too risky.

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson  <cjs@cynic.net>   +81 90 7737 2974   http://www.netbsd.org
    Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light.  --XTC