Comments on: Why Symbolics died http://blog.amber.org/2005/07/18/why-symbolics-died/ Thoughts of a minor lunatic Wed, 21 Oct 2009 01:55:36 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 hourly 1 By: Christopher Browne http://blog.amber.org/2005/07/18/why-symbolics-died/comment-page-1/#comment-3360 Christopher Browne Fri, 30 Sep 2005 15:09:25 +0000 http://blog.amber.org/?p=1726#comment-3360 "Exorbitant price" isn't a good reason for the failure; that sort of pricing was not atypical for high end workstations of the day. SGI hardware with similar specifications would have cost similar amounts. (Of course, SGI isn't doing too well today...) The real problem was that it was difficult for this kind of design to adapt to the cheap "Pee Cee" hardware that emerged. That is, performance of this sort of (highly customized) hardware couldn't keep pace with the performance increases that came from Intel spending Billion$ on IA-32 development. SGI tried to "dance" into the PC market; their unsuccessful leap into trying to hawk NT servers showed a pretty big misstep. Symbolics had tied their future to Digital as Genera was ported to run atop Alpha/OSF/1; it could not have been evident at the time that this was a mistake, but what with HP now porting VMS to Itanium, it is clear now :-(. “Exorbitant price” isn’t a good reason for the failure; that sort of pricing was not atypical for high end workstations of the day. SGI hardware with similar specifications would have cost similar amounts. (Of course, SGI isn’t doing too well today…)

The real problem was that it was difficult for this kind of design to adapt to the cheap “Pee Cee” hardware that emerged. That is, performance of this sort of (highly customized) hardware couldn’t keep pace with the performance increases that came from Intel spending Billion$ on IA-32 development.

SGI tried to “dance” into the PC market; their unsuccessful leap into trying to hawk NT servers showed a pretty big misstep.

Symbolics had tied their future to Digital as Genera was ported to run atop Alpha/OSF/1; it could not have been evident at the time that this was a mistake, but what with HP now porting VMS to Itanium, it is clear now :-(.

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