The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
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From: Brian Inglis on 29 Mar 2007 06:24 fOn 26 Mar 2007 18:26:24 GMT in alt.folklore.computers, nmm1(a)cus.cam.ac.uk (Nick Maclaren) wrote: > >In article <56qh33F29t3i0U1(a)mid.individual.net>, >Del Cecchi <cecchinospam(a)us.ibm.com> writes: >|> >|> They probably would have run out of pdp-8 and pdp-11 customers sooner or >|> later. And by the early 80's I would think those systems were in the >|> down part of the lifecycle. > >Unclear. PDP11s dominated the (computer) communications in the early >1980s, even in many sites with System/370 mainframes! They were run >for many years after their official demise, because they were just SO >much better for the purpose than anything else. > >What DEC should have done (and was told so at the time) was to produce >a 32-bit PDP11, specialised for such purposes, and capture the computer >communication market. This would have been a completely separate range >from the VAX, but would have needed very little software support, and >not all that much in the way of peripheral support. The Z80 was already in that market using Intel?/Zilog? Sync/Async comm chip, using that pair of chips per channel. Doubt any PDP11 could compete on price or performance. -- Thanks. Take care, Brian Inglis Calgary, Alberta, Canada Brian.Inglis(a)CSi.com (Brian[dot]Inglis{at}SystematicSW[dot]ab[dot]ca) fake address use address above to reply
From: Brian Inglis on 29 Mar 2007 06:40 On Mon, 26 Mar 07 11:27:52 GMT in alt.folklore.computers, jmfbahciv(a)aol.com wrote: >In article <Vf-dnSMExMAU4JvbnZ2dneKdnZydnZ2d(a)bt.com>, > Andrew Swallow <am.swallow(a)btopenworld.com> wrote: >>jmfbahciv(a)aol.com wrote: >>> In article <rqh3ue.6m61.ln(a)via.reistad.name>, >>> Morten Reistad <first(a)last.name> wrote: >>[snip] >> >>>> >>>> The decision of May 17th 1983 couldn't have been much different. >>>> >>>>> After all, people want to upgrade their computers in the most >>>>> effective way possible - and the most effective way is the one that >>>>> requires them to spend the least money converting their own programs >>>>> and data. >>>>> >>>>> So if nobody makes PDP-10 computers any more, there's no particular >>>>> benefit to their owners doing their next upgrade with DEC - and a >>>>> motive not to do so, so as to punish this behavior. >>>>> >>>>> Under what circumstances would abandoning their 10 and 20 customers be >>>>> rational? >>>> This is where I have an issue with DEC. It was the abandonment of the >>>> customers. >>> >>> No, no. _PDP-10_ customers. This was Bell's doing through and through. >> >>Worse DEC dropped the PDP-11 customers, > >Sigh! Now _when_ are you talking about. This was not true in >the early 80s. When the PDP-11 product line was sold off, Bell >was long gone. It was obvious DEC was dropping non-VAX h/w and s/w by the early 80s: Marketing was pushing VAX and had nothing positive to say about other products. >> LSI-11 customers, PDP-8 >>customers and the VAX/VMS customers. Eventually the company runs >>out of customers. DEC had no plans to produce bigger VAX systems in the early 80s, and peripherals were same as 11 range, so commercial non-compute price/performance and expandability were non-competitive. >You are talking about the 90s when the plan was to strip the company >down to its help desk, which is the only piece that Compaq wanted. DEC was producing useful VAX machines by then, but scared customers again with its attitudes towards Alpha: they appeared flakey to management who remembered their history. Had they kept pushing VAX as their "370" line, positioning Alpha as their RISC/workstation line, they would have had a good business, but they had a history of creating FUD about their own plans and sowed customer distrust. >What is really sad is that they trashed it and then HP seems to have >completed the job. HP may still be supporting OpenVMS on Itanics. -- Thanks. Take care, Brian Inglis Calgary, Alberta, Canada Brian.Inglis(a)CSi.com (Brian[dot]Inglis{at}SystematicSW[dot]ab[dot]ca) fake address use address above to reply
From: Brian Inglis on 29 Mar 2007 07:00 fOn 27 Mar 2007 08:43:47 GMT in alt.folklore.computers, nmm1(a)cus.cam.ac.uk (Nick Maclaren) wrote: > >In article <byrnsj-FDFD08.19484226032007(a)newsclstr02.news.prodigy.com>, >John Byrns <byrnsj(a)sbcglobal.net> writes: >|> >|> I always thought DEC should have extended the PDP-11 to 32 bits and >|> skipped the VAX. The PDP-11 was a very elegant design whose fatal flaw >|> was its 16 bitness, while the VAX seemed overly complex to me. > >The PDP-11 never made much impact as a 'general' computer, especially >in the commercial arena, whereas the PDP-10 and PDP-20 did. The VAX >was intended to capture the latter market and, in the research arena, >it did. They did a good commercial business with 11/70s running RSTS/E, IAS, RSX-11D as departmental minis, but growing companies wanting to get away from file processing, use databases, handle more users and functions, without proliferating machine counts, had no growth path with Digital. >|> I can't >|> remember how I thought DEC should have gone about extending the PDP-11 >|> instruction set to 32 bits, I guess that gives me a second chance to >|> think about it. Do you know what the proposals were at the time for how >|> the PDP-11 instruction set could have been extended to 32 bits? > >No. And the ISA was irrelevent for the purposes I mean - it was the >design and functionality that mattered. Mainly the OS commands and interfaces: a 32 bit merge of RSTS/E and IAS/ RSX-11D with a growth path could have retained a large percentage of PDP-11 users IMHO. RSTS/E emulators supported shared documentation, development, and some testing of RT-11 and RSX-11 tasks, while IAS on RSX-11D offered a better customizable infrastructure AFAIR: the details are now too vague. -- Thanks. Take care, Brian Inglis Calgary, Alberta, Canada Brian.Inglis(a)CSi.com (Brian[dot]Inglis{at}SystematicSW[dot]ab[dot]ca) fake address use address above to reply
From: Brian Inglis on 29 Mar 2007 07:04 On Tue, 27 Mar 07 11:05:51 GMT in alt.folklore.computers, jmfbahciv(a)aol.com wrote: >In article <byrnsj-FDFD08.19484226032007(a)newsclstr02.news.prodigy.com>, > John Byrns <byrnsj(a)sbcglobal.net> wrote: >>In article <eu938g$9t7$1(a)gemini.csx.cam.ac.uk>, >> nmm1(a)cus.cam.ac.uk (Nick Maclaren) wrote: >> >>> In article <56qh33F29t3i0U1(a)mid.individual.net>, >>> Del Cecchi <cecchinospam(a)us.ibm.com> writes: >>> |> >>> |> They probably would have run out of pdp-8 and pdp-11 customers sooner or >>> |> later. And by the early 80's I would think those systems were in the >>> |> down part of the lifecycle. >>> >>> Unclear. PDP11s dominated the (computer) communications in the early >>> 1980s, even in many sites with System/370 mainframes! They were run >>> for many years after their official demise, because they were just SO >>> much better for the purpose than anything else. >>> >>> What DEC should have done (and was told so at the time) was to produce >>> a 32-bit PDP11, specialised for such purposes, and capture the computer >>> communication market. This would have been a completely separate range >>> from the VAX, but would have needed very little software support, and >>> not all that much in the way of peripheral support. >> >>I always thought DEC should have extended the PDP-11 to 32 bits and >>skipped the VAX. > >No. The VAX was the DEC's answer to perceived need for an >agility w.r.t. byte manipulation. The KL BIS didn't work well. The PDP-11 was the ultimately agile (8 bit) byte manipulator: IIRC The high bit of the opcode set indicated byte operands BICBW. The VAX was the Virtual Addressing eXtension, no more. -- Thanks. Take care, Brian Inglis Calgary, Alberta, Canada Brian.Inglis(a)CSi.com (Brian[dot]Inglis{at}SystematicSW[dot]ab[dot]ca) fake address use address above to reply
From: Brian Inglis on 29 Mar 2007 07:20
fOn Wed, 28 Mar 07 11:16:23 GMT in alt.folklore.computers, jmfbahciv(a)aol.com wrote: >In article <46099974$0$18859$4c368faf(a)roadrunner.com>, > Peter Flass <Peter_Flass(a)Yahoo.com> wrote: >>jmfbahciv(a)aol.com wrote: >>> >>> And I'm telling you, again, that DEC did not have the infrastructure >>> to handle that support. DEC's main business was not retail-ish. >>> >> >>Even IBM decided they didn't want to be in this business. > >I've spent quite a bit of my thinking time trying to figure out >how to do the single task of software support with 200 million >systems. I still don't have it. Micshit is trying by using the >internet and edictive practices. That's not working either. > >Number one rule is to not ship security holes and have a backout >plan when you do. > >I haven't thought of any way to do this. Micshit's answer is an >"as is" which was anathema to the manufacturers of the past. Ahem, manufacturers didn't do software support: they did production and maintenance. A few inhouse staff did the software support, complained to the manufacturer occasionally, mostly got some response, rarely got changes made, if it followed the strategic direction (on the mini products). The same model would have worked for personal workstations, with the customer being responsible for most support. DEC FE supported their terminals in the same quantities, and later Digital trained those staff to support microVAXes and workstations (badly). The assumptions different from MicroSoft would have included quality software on 16 bit or better microprocessors and internal tech support: reduces the software support to a bit more than that provided for the mini products, and the hardware support to that provided for the terminal products. -- Thanks. Take care, Brian Inglis Calgary, Alberta, Canada Brian.Inglis(a)CSi.com (Brian[dot]Inglis{at}SystematicSW[dot]ab[dot]ca) fake address use address above to reply |