The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
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From: David Powell on 30 Mar 2007 14:39 In article <eugdic$8qk_012(a)s879.apx1.sbo.ma.dialup.rcn.com>, jmfbahciv(a)aol.com in alt.folklore.computers wrote: >In article <9gal035ncoglbdnvkd8m7odgl59o2opg9b(a)4ax.com>, > David Powell <ddotpowell(a)icuknet.co.uk> wrote: >>In article <Stydndude4YPyJTbRVnygAA(a)bt.com>, >> Andrew Swallow <am.swallow(a)btopenworld.com> in >>alt.folklore.computers wrote: >> >>>jmfbahciv(a)aol.com wrote: >> >> [big snip here] >> >>>>> We are talking LSI-11 vs 8086. Even if DEC did not sell to the consumer >>>>> market the $1000 business computer on every desk market is enormous. >>>> >>>> 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. >>> >>>Neither did IBM, so IBM created a new distribution infrastructure. >>> >> >>Do you remember Hamilton Rentals, or Rapid Recall? > >No. > I wouldn't expect that you would, my comment was responding to Andrew S, who, apparently, is not aware of how DEC sold LSI-11etc in the UK. >> They were the two >>distributors appointed by DEC (United Kingdom) in the early 1980s to >>sell the small LSI-11 etc stuff. > >I did not say that there were none; AAMOF, I very carefully >wrote that it wasn't our main business. See above. Just for the record, in UK, 1980s, DEC were interested in VAX /VMS to the exclusion of all else. >> >>>DEC sold to the technical part of companies - so the salesmen, >>>warehouses and trucks needed in the first year existed. >>> >> >>Trucks with tail-lifts to move VAXes, LSI-11 stuff came in small >>cardboard boxes delivered by the postman on his pushbike. :) > >Did you require a full-blown soft/hardware maintenance contract? >The infrastructure to provide is what I'm talking about. Swallow >is ignoring this aspect of the computer biz on purpose. > Regards, David P.
From: Rich Alderson on 30 Mar 2007 16:41 jmfbahciv(a)aol.com writes: > In article <mddd52rx59j.fsf(a)panix5.panix.com>, > Rich Alderson <news(a)alderson.users.panix.com> wrote: >> They wanted 8-bit bytes and power-of-2 words, and nothing was going to >> change their minds about that. > Then customers would continue to buy -11s and move the boring grunt work to > the -10s and their secretaries. I see that the point was completely missed, and there's no use in trying to fix it. -- Rich Alderson | /"\ ASCII ribbon | news(a)alderson.users.panix.com | \ / campaign against | "You get what anybody gets. You get a lifetime." | x HTML mail and | --Death, of the Endless | / \ postings |
From: Rich Alderson on 30 Mar 2007 16:57 Jan Vorbr�ggen <jvorbrueggen(a)not-mediasec.de> writes: >> Oh? That would come as a surprise to the students at LOTS after 1984, when >> we clustered the three 2065s, and eventually the Systems Concepts SC-30M, on >> the CI bus that came with the HSC-50s and RA-81 disks (all invented, BTW, >> for the 36-bit Jupiter). Cross-system resource sharing, central login (a >> Stanford innovation that was taken back by DEC^WDigital for Tops-20 v6.1), >> and so on. > Was that as closely coupled at all levels of the OS as is the VMScluster? In > any case, who wrote the software you mention above? It's monitor-level code, and it's damnably tightly coupled (so much so that we turned off certain features to avoid cluster-wide hangs if a system crashed). The names that pop up in the CFS modules are Miller and Raspuzzi. In the MSCP disk drivers, we find Dunn, Wachs, and McLean. All 36-bit developers, hmm? -- Rich Alderson | /"\ ASCII ribbon | news(a)alderson.users.panix.com | \ / campaign against | "You get what anybody gets. You get a lifetime." | x HTML mail and | --Death, of the Endless | / \ postings |
From: Rich Alderson on 30 Mar 2007 17:05 Jan Vorbr�ggen <jvorbrueggen(a)not-mediasec.de> writes: >> OK, then my question goes back to Jan and Barb. Why was a full sysgen >> required or recommended for the situations you guys were talking about? >> Wouldn't partial gens do the job without the need for the large >> resource commitment Jan talked about? > At least for the first 10 years or so, VAX/VMS wasn't structured in a > sufficiently loose way to make this feasible, IMO - we're talking the core of > the OS here, of course, not all of the utilities etc. that constitute the > bulk of the code. However, if you needed to make an interface change at the > syscall level, you'd need to recompile everything. > And anyway, I can't think of a problem that would have required a rebuild. > Significantly upgrading a subsystem, like the batch or print job management, > would have been much easier with the source - but as I said, DEC customers ^^^ > never considered such things until (too) late, in contrast to IBM's > customers. ITYM "VMS". Customers on all the other architectures (16, 12, 18, *and* 36 bit systems) from DEC did significant mods to all the system software (monitor and user level), and passed the results around at DECUS and/or sent them back to DEC for wider distribution. -- Rich Alderson | /"\ ASCII ribbon | news(a)alderson.users.panix.com | \ / campaign against | "You get what anybody gets. You get a lifetime." | x HTML mail and | --Death, of the Endless | / \ postings |
From: Peter Flass on 30 Mar 2007 19:25
jmfbahciv(a)aol.com wrote: > In article <euggeu$92m$1(a)gemini.csx.cam.ac.uk>, > nmm1(a)cus.cam.ac.uk (Nick Maclaren) wrote: > >>In article <eugf8g$8qk_003(a)s879.apx1.sbo.ma.dialup.rcn.com>, >>jmfbahciv(a)aol.com writes: >>|> >>|> It could be the way DEC tracked the sales. PDP-10 product line >>|> never got any "credit" for all the minis it sold. >> >>I was actually thinking from the customer end, but cannot say which >>was the chicken and which the egg. > > > Neither could DEC managmeent and their bean counters. They ended > up ignoring that (I can never remember the correct value) somewhere > between 60-70% of the mini customers also had at least one PDP-10. > Most had more. > IBM had and has this problem too. Maybe there's just no way to quantify it sufficiently for the MBAs that look at this stuff. Many times I've seen them cancel a product that probably sold lots of other stuff with it. |