Itanic was sunk before launch - by Alpha compiler
I had an early DEC 3000 Alpha 400/400S AXP workstation. It had a C compiler that did extremely deep/wide source parallelism analysis across an entire application, what EPIC later promised. I experimented and found that the degree of "hidden" parallelism discovered in no way compensated for the inconvenience and time required to recompile the entire application from source just to edit one module. Yes, I conducted detailed, controlled studies at (then) DCRT at the NIH. Around late 1992 or early 1993. Oh, yes, you could do EPIC on an Alpha in 1992! Just pick the right compiler options and compile the whole source at once.
This whole disaster could have easily been avoided had someone at HP or Intel simply repeated what I did a decade earlier with that Alpha.
Yet IBM decided I didn't deserve to have a job selling HP Itanics to Mickey Mouse (he evidently likes HP-UX better than IBM POWER with the COBOL like AIX OS) so I was RA'd.
Go figure...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
