[HECnet] NT 4 on AlphaServer es40

[Paul_Koning at Dell.com]

On Feb 11, 2013, at 7:21 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:

...
Speaking of IAS, it really looks cool when reading specs, but I've never touched it, and another aspect of those specs is that it looks like it would be rather slow...

IAS was basically RSX11-D with a timesharing system layered over it.   My exposure to it was in supporting Typeset-11, which originally ran on RSX11-D and in later versions moved to IAS.   For our purposes, the two were identical; we did not use the timesharing facilities of IAS at all.   I'm not sure why Typeset-11 used RSX11-D instead of -M as most of the competition did.   Perhaps history -- it may be that it predated -M.

And yes, it was pretty heavy.   It did work well enough for what we wanted, but it did use a whole 11/70 to support an application that was less functional than what competitors did with an 11/45.   For example, Typeset-11 did not have WYSIWIG editing while the other guys did, and that was a major black mark.

Never seen TRAX in real life either, btw. What was so good about it?

Nothing.   It was one of the most spectacular failures in DEC history.   A whole new OS (well, based on RSX I believe) and new hardware designed specifically for it (VT62), canceled a week after it was first announced.

The only other DEC product that comes close is the DESNC, though that took much longer -- canceled after a year or so, as I recall, having sold a total of 4 units over that time span.   (For those who don't recognize the model code: that's a 2 port 10 Mb/s Ethernet bridge that could encrypt the traffic.   Among other problems, it only ran at about 4 Mb/s.)

	paul