Re: HEADSUP: Alpha support is being retired in 7.0

On Thu, 2006-May-11 15:30:35 -0700, Kevin Oberman wrote:
>exists and its creators (designers) are very sad at its demise. It was
>an amazing design for its time and could have been a powerful force in
>hardware with anything that resembled reasonable marketing.

My sentiments as well.  When I first used it (in late 1998), I thought
the architecture looked weird but after using it for a while and
reading more about the design decisions, I came to the conclusion that
it was one of the better designed architectures around.  There were a
few warts (requiring software assistance to fully support IEEE FP but
not supporting precise exceptions was the biggest IMHO) but DEC
actually considered the likely impact of future changes to technology,
rather than just band-aiding an existing architecture to meet the
current technology limitations/requirements.

-- 
Peter Jeremy