[HECnet] Trying to build SIMH from git (on OpenIndiana)

[Bill Pechter]

>> What happened to Masscomp?
>  
> One of the Drexel, Burham, Lambert - leveraged buy-outs of the late 1980 of Milken et al.
> The guppy swallowed a whale.    DBL organized a leveraged buy-out of Perkin-Elmer's computer division to create Concurrent Computer Corp (ticker: CCUR).    Masscomp was actually the surviving legal entity, and actually the surviving technology, but the PE guys were clueless and they were the surviving management team.   Funny part is CCUR still exists
>
> Clem  

Actually, having been there at CCUR at the time, the mess that was caused by the merger was amazing.
Concurent had been around two years when they merged with (swallowed) Masscomp.

I was told Concurrent thought they could dump the existing manufacturing in Westford -- because they used to build legacy Perkin Elmer 7350 boxes (IIRC).   Those were a small UniPlus system based on the 68000 with no virtual memory paging and a limited number of options.

They didn't understand the product, the diagnostics or the manufacturing processing. ECO's were not always documented in the stuff CCUR got.   As an old DEC guy, I was at least familliar with the diagnostic supervisor and stuff.   Masscomp was very DEC-like in the diags.   So was Alliant when I was there.

The guys in Masscomp found other jobs.   ECO changes never got transfered in the knowledge transfer.
Training at Conccurrent didn't have much understanding of the hardware. By the time they got manufacturing up they lost too much time and the PC platform began to be dominant.   I think they were delayed in shipping some models by about a quarter.

The only thing keeping them afloat in the early 90's was the use of OS/32 boxes (old Perkin Elmer
32xx's) for various military and security uses.   Their   non-mililtary uses were aircraft simulators and industrial control stuff.   Both of those had VAX boxes as competitors and the 68k stuff was also moving into that space.

I remember the folks pushing the 32xx iron plugged their fast context switch time vs. DEC.  

I seem to remember their high end box when I left in 1988 was the 68030 with the 68040 being new.
When I came back in 1992 they were looking at PowerPC

I kept saying they should port the stuff to x86 and make the RTU a FreeBSD based OS and get out of the hardware and just to Real-Time Unix software.   They didn't see that they needed someone with cheaper costs doing the assembly and design -- so they could concentrate on the high end value-add controllers and software.

Embedded stuff kept getting cheaper and smaller and the RTU hardware was expensive.

Harris split their computer division into a defense/security piece and a commercial piece.   Concurrent was the surviving legal entity for the   Harris-CCUR merger.   Harris was a big RTU OEM and reseller to the government... I think they even had sources to RTU.

I left for Pyramid Technology traning only to come back when AT&T dropped Pyramid in the NCR deal and half the Pyramid business went bye-bye.   When I tell people I know OS/x they think OSx.

Masscomp was a good place to learn about dual-universe Unix.   When I hit Pyramid I went to town.
Not only did they do dual libraries -- they did two versions of every command -- the UCB universe version and the ATT version.

The sick part was the 3 UUCP varients that could be configured to talk to each other like they were separate machines.

I'd kill to see the sources for dual universe Unix so I could look to see about implementing a BSD/Linux dual universe clone...   I'm mostly a sysadmin -- but I'm crazy.   

A lot of Unix guys tell me how ugly dual universe is -- but I actually liked it.


bill