>"Itanium was created precisely because HP thought it couldn't keep PA-RISC competitive."
I'd be curious to hear why that had that outlook. Wasn't HP still doing gangbuster's business at that point? Or was it something else besides having the financial resources?
They thought that they couldn't compete in the future because they didn't have the fabs to do it. They thought that by throwing in with Intel they could make headway into the high end server space.
Additionally, everyone was using Sun machines to develop on (this is before the stupid-long delays with UltraSPARC). They also thought that the future was code on Windows workstations connected to HP big server iron. That was Rick Belluzo's contribution to killing HP-UX workstations. He left after awhile to go try to sell the same sauce to SGI. Finally the wound up at MSFT.
Fast-forward and now Linux is dominant and who even uses HP-UX or the other proprietary UNIXes?
I'd be curious to hear why that had that outlook. Wasn't HP still doing gangbuster's business at that point? Or was it something else besides having the financial resources?