DEC Prism - Friction and Cancellation

Friction and Cancellation

Throughout the Prism period, DEC was involved in a major debate over the future direction of the company. As newer workstations were introduced, the performance benefit of the VAX was constantly eroded, and the price/performance ratio completely undermined. Different groups within the company debated how to best respond. Some advocated moving the VAX into the "high-end", abandoning the low-end to the workstations. Others suggested moving into the workstation market using a commodity processor. Still others suggested re-implementing the VAX on a RISC processor.

This led to considerable problems with turf wars between the various groups. Competition between the divisions delayed the architecture review, which wasn't closed until 1986. Work on associated support chips, the memory management unit and floating point unit, were later interrupted by yet another debate on whether or not the design should be 32- or 64-bit. The MicroPrism design was not finalized until April 1988.

Frustrated with the growing number of losses to cheaper faster competitive machines, independently, a small group outside of Central Engineering, focused on workstations and UNIX/Ultrix, entertained the idea of using an off-the-shelf RISC processor to build a new family of workstations. The group carried out due diligence, eventually choosing the MIPS R2000 as the desired foundation. This group acquired a development machine and, in cooperation with hand-picked members of the Ultrix Engineering Group, prototyped a port of Ultrix to the MIPS R2000 system. From the initial meetings with MIPS to a prototype machine took only 90 days, with full production able to start by January 1989, resulting in the DECstation 3100 and family. At a meeting reviewing the various projects in July 1988, the company decided to cancel Prism, and continue with the MIPS workstations and high-end VAX products.

Ironically, every attempt to produce a faster VAX that could compete with newer workstations was essentially a failure. The VAX 9000 ran into delays, and by the time it shipped newer Unix workstations had already surpassed it in performance, at a tiny fraction of the cost (or size). Apparently aware of this danger, at the very same meeting where Prism was canceled, Ken Olsen started a new project to continue exploring a RISC-based VAX. This indirectly led to the formation of the Alpha project the next year.