[HECnet] NT 4 on AlphaServer es40

[Clem Cole]

On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 8:08 PM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
Well, the 11/70 easily outlived the 11/44, in that 11/70 machines were still sold after the 11/44 was terminated, as far as I know.

Interesting data.    I'm a little surprised to hear it because DEC was clearly trying to get the traditional 11/70 customer to move to the VAX line in those days.    I wonder if the 70 was used in some commercial settings where they wanted a real duplicate.    Unlike the Nova/Esclipe the VAX had a "compatibility mode" but it was a tad impure.    The OS was different and binaries did not work with some assistance.      Other than running Dungeon and few other games, I never knew a customer that used compatibility mode in production - it was a great sales tools, but once folks got their VAX they tended to do a "full port" of the code.       So swapping a VAX besides costing more, meant some systems/SW work on the customers part.    That was not true of the 11/44.

I remember buying an 11/44 for use where we did not need (could not afford an VAX for that use) but wanted the larger address space over the 40 class machines.   We had a very large 11/70 and were also buying Vaxen at the time,

That particular machine was the last 11 I ever personally was part of the purchase and I moved on to other things, so I sort of stopped watching the progress of the PDP11 line.    I know the QBUS gave the 11 some amount of resurgence, although by then most of us were using Vaxen or 68K based UNIX boxes.

Thanks for the information.

Clem