Comment by alexey-salmin
2 days ago
The line between stubbornness and persistence is very thin. It's easy to rationalize post-factum that A was right to push his idea even when everyone told him it won't work, and B was stupid not to listen when everyone told him it won't work.
DEC tried something and failed, that gives me more joy than seeing Intel failing without trying. Transition from Otellini to Krzanich driven by the risk-averse board was painful to watch from within.
Right; if you claim Olsen should have listened to all the experts in 01989 telling him VAX was doomed because it was CISC instead of RISC, you are also pretty much claiming Andy Grove should have listened to all the experts in 01989 telling him the 80486 was doomed because it was CISC instead of RISC. They were right about the VAX and wrong about the 80486, but that wasn't clear for about five years. See my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43811508 for more details.
ECL vs. CMOS is a slightly different battle, but HPC companies (and Amdahl) kept shipping new commercially viable ECL processors until the mid-90s, and the VAX 9000 was sort of aimed at those markets. Tera shipped their first bipolar MTA in 01998, and if they'd managed to ship it a year or two earlier, it might have been commercially viable too. So it wasn't crazy to think that an ECL VAX 9000 would be the success that the ECL VAX 8000 series had been. It was just wrong.