[HECnet] NT 4 on AlphaServer es40

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2013-02-13 19:12, Clem Cole wrote:

On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 11:12 AM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se
<mailto:bqt at softjar.se>> wrote:

      DEC let the PDP-11 live as a niche product for small realtime use,
      where they did recognize that the VAX just could not compete because
      of price. But faster and larger PDP-11 models would have cut into
      their VAX business, and thus it did not happen, even though
      customers wanted.


Oh, how I know.   (more in a minute).

Fair enough, but I really think it was a little different as I lived
that era.     From talking to them, as I understand it a number of DEC
folks in Laboratory Products Division (LDP) very much wanted the Vax
line to be able to sell into the RT business and deal with some of the
issues you expressed.     But I don't think DEC was afraid of the 11
moving up, but more that they started to walk away from the RT business.
    They wanted the commercial customer and with the VAX they were
starting to be competitive there and basically stopped investing.

I was one of the early Masscomp guys, which was made up a lot of folks
who had been in LDP, a number of ex-CPU guys from Vax (780, 750, 730),
and the PDP-11 (at least the 34), a number of ex-DEC SW types who had
done RSX, RT11, VMS, the compilers etc.     Masscomp built the first Real
Time Unix machine (and the first commercial UNIX multiprocessor but
that's another story).       The sales guys were always trying to get us to
add RSX or RT11 "features" (inc DECNet)     We did build ASTs but never
did QIO, although tjt did build a solution that offered the same effect
with slightly different semantics.     I'm the one that blocked DECnet and
said - IP/TCP was the way to go (which would prove to be the right choice).

But the real key was when Masscomp got a number of the old DEC compiler
team back together and built the original Masscomp FORTRAN compiler what
could accept VMS FTN syntax, we never lost a competitive sale to RSX (or
RT11), and usually beat the Vaxen of that day [and was always why we
were 10-20% faster than Sun for the longest time using the same 10Mhz
68000 chip - we had a better compiler].

I remember that around that time we got a nasty gram from KO [I wonder
who has that letter these days].

Dave Cane (who had been the 750 lead) once said that the MC-500 (the
original Masscomp machine) was what he had hope the 750 could have been;
but DEC would not let him.

Anyway - my point is that it was the compilers, more than the HW or the
OS that actually was the key feature the traditional RT customer really
care about   --   no matter if it was a VAX and 11 or one of the 68K base
systems; and what DEC did was lose focus for that customer - hence the
value of doing some of the things you mentioned was lost.

Well. Customers staying with PDP-11 and not upgrading to VAXen was not because of compilers.
And it was not because the customers didn't want faster machines either, easily proved by the large aftermarket for upgrading PDP-11s. Some of that market still lives, even though both the PDP-11 and DEC have officially been dead for over 10 years now...

You are not the only one who lived in that era...

Face it - DEC wanted customers to buy VAXen, if at all possible. Lots of customers stayed with PDP-11 anyway. I know of plenty of PDP-11s still running in production. Can't say I've stumbled into any Masscomp machines, but I admit that I have not been looking.

	Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                                   || "I'm on a bus
                                                                  ||   on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se                         ||   Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                                         ||   tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol