[HECnet] NT 4 on AlphaServer es40

[Clem Cole]

On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 1:21 PM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
I know of plenty of PDP-11s still running in production
No doubt.    They were (are) excellent systems and used in amazing places.    I know of newspaper system that used PDP-11's to control the presses and a VAX to link it all up.    I know the Vax was replaced by a Unix box a few years ago, but last I knew the PDP-11s were still running the presses.

  
Can't say I've stumbled into any Masscomp machines,

I still see them in pictures that run in Mission Control at NASA (they are the consoles that the controllers are using - I have one of them in collect - its the machine I have here with a working 9 track drive).   I believe that a number of places in the US and in NATO with names like "Federal Technologies" still have them ;-).    To this day, they are unmatched in analog I/O.    They had a standard a piece of hardware LDP wanted to make for DEC but never did (a bus with a microcoded controller that could sample analog I/O at an incredible rate).

As a company, Masscomp actually still exists, unlike DEC sadly.    The company is now called Concurrent Computer (CCUR), but Masscomp was surviving legal entry when the Masscomp BoD decided to buy Perkin-Elmer's computer Division in the early 1990s.    I still have some wall paper that has only sentimental value after all of the reverse splits etc.

Clem

Fun fact:

Many people never knew it, but if you looked under the disk cabinet on the later 500s and 5000s there are screw mounts on every rack mount system that did not seem to be used.    They were for the "optional" C4 charges that certain customers needs to mount when there was not enough time to erase the disk but ensure it was unreadable. Although I got to see them in a deployed system in the UK, I never saw that C4 option actually "exec'ed."