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From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Privilege Levels Below User
Date: Tue, 11 Jun 2024 04:07:17 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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On Mon, 10 Jun 2024 15:23:51 GMT, Anton Ertl wrote:

> One other thing they did: they had one PAL code coming with the SRM
> console for VMS and Digital OSF/1, and another PAL code with the
> ARC/AlphaBIOS console for Windows NT and Linux.  This allowed them to
> charge extra (quite a lot) for hardware capable of running their premium
> OSs, while providing almost competetive prices for hardware running PC
> OSs.

Let me offer an anecdote related (or not?) to this. I had a client with 
several DEC Alphas, all running DEC Unix (variously branded “OSF/1” and 
“Tru64”). The battery died on one of them, and it came up with a prompt 
asking for a Windows NT boot disk.

Both the user and I felt disappointed that a piece of such premium DEC 
hardware, when it lost its mind, would default to asking for Windows NT, 
of all OSes.

> Unfortunately, the PC-like package was still not price/performance
> competetive, and AlphaBIOS (which we had on our EV56 boxes) was a horror
> to work with.

Windows NT was a disaster to the entire Unix workstation market. The irony 
was, NT “Workstation” wasn’t really feature-equivalent to the OSes the 
Unix workstations were running. But it was enough for the customers, it 
seems ...