Is Digital fucked up or what?  I heard Palmer give a speech 3
	years ago at Decus in Washingtom DC, wherein he talked about their
	committment to open systems, spec 11-70 and all that crap.

	Did his minions not get the message?

	You can't subsidize software (i.e. Digital Unix) by jacking up
	hardware costs.  Digital could well take a lesson from IBM.


On Thu, 9 Oct 1997, Berndt Josef Wulf wrote:

> Ted Lemon wrote
> > 
> > 
> > > All of the 21164's with a -Pn designation are the "NT only" versions of the
> > > 21164.  However, it wasn't untill the -P7 that the "NT only" nature of the
> > > "NT only" processors began to be enforced.
> > 
> > Again, I don't believe this is true.   If you want to give us evidence
> > of such enforcement, please do, but otherwise I see no value in making
> > rash accusations.
> > 
> > 			       _MelloN_
> > 
> > 
> 
> 
> This is what I've found. Hope this clears some doubts....
> 
> ____________________  Official from Digital ____________________
> 
> 
> Universal and PC Alpha Microprocessors
> 
> 
> There are two variants of most Alpha microprocessors manufactured by
> Digital Semiconductor,
> a Digital Equipment Business.  These variants were created in order to
> enable delivery of
> lower priced processors for systems that would compete in the emerging
> Windows NT PC
> marketplace.
> 
> >From a contractual standpoint, the license for Digital Unix explicitly
> lists the Alpha
> processor part types for which it is supported.  Running the operating
> system on a
> non-supported processor is in violation of the software license.  This
> could subject the
> user and potentially the company delivering the configured system to lose
> the privilege to
> use and/or sell this software.
> 
> >From a technical standpoint,  the PC microprocessors only support a
> limited set of memory
> management options sufficient for Windows NT and some other operating
> systems, while the
> Universal parts support all of the memory management modes necessary for
> operation of
> OpenVMS and Digital UNIX.
> 
> In our manufacturing process, we will sometimes substitute the full
> function processor and
> mark it as a PC part in order to optimize our manufacturing costs.  This is
> possible since
> the Universal part is a proper superset of the PC part and will be able to
> be used in any
> system designed for the PC part.  However, since this is not always the
> case, anyone
> depending on this occurrence will be faced with an unreliable source of
> supply.  Any set of
> parts may contain any number that will not run Digital UNIX or VMS, while
> all will run
> Windows NT.
> 
> 
> 
> In summary:  Our PC Alpha microprocessors lack memory management functions
> necessary for
> running Digital UNIX and OpenVMS.  In addition, using PC Alpha processors
> with Digital UNIX
> explicitly violates the software license for this product and will not be
> supported.  While
> we will at times mark full function parts as NT parts, this can not be
> counted on and will
> not be supported by Digital.
> 
> 
> Tony Catuogno
> Digital Semiconductor
> Business Development Manager
> Alpha Microprocessors
> 
> ___________________________________________________
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Name	: Berndt Josef Wulf
> E-Mail	: wulf@ping.net.au
> Sysinfo	: DEC AXPpci33+, NetBSD-1.2
>