Wednesday July 28, 2004

June 8th 1994

June 8th 2004 was the 10 year anniversary of the Intel-HP announcement about what would turn out to be Itanium. I still remember reading this "Intel and HP announce hi-end co-operation" post on comp.arch 10 years ago, and thinking this was the end of the road for all other architectures. How the mighty have fallen!

Up until a couple of years ago, I believed Itanium could and would still make it. I saw the trusty old Stanford mail server xenon.stanford.edu which used to be a Sun server (motd: "A gift from Sun Microsystems") turn into an Itanium box (motd: "A gift from Intel Corporation"). But, unbelievably, the Itanium machine was so unstable that it had to be replaced. Xenon is now a Linux/x86 box and its motd as of August 11th 2004 reads:

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Welcome to Xenon.Stanford.EDU!
The Itanium is dead! Long live Xenon!
Please report Xenon problems to: action@xenon
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