[HECnet] Which DECnet interfaces support remote, unattended, booting?

[Clem Cole]

On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 1:57 PM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
Unibus VAXen basically means VAX-11 machines. They booted either from VMB on console media, or (for the 11/750) from a boot block. No network capabilities there. They could not even boot from tape.

Amen, and seemingly hard to believe.    It seems so primitive by today's standards.   But it actually makes sense.   Disks in those days were a huge expense within  the total system price, but  definitely  part of it.    A system in the Vax class really needed to be self-supporting.    So the concept of it not have local storage would have been strange and frankly not able to be sold.

Let's also not forget that in those days Ethernet HW was not particularly cheap either.    The 3Com stinger taps cost about $500 each, and that did not include the $~2-3K for the 3Cxxx for the Unibus.

I remember when Apollo announced  the "Twins" machines were 2 nodes with a shared single disk in ~1984/85 - which actually did work reasonably well.    Sun did the "diskless" Sun-3 in response, and they did not.   I do not think DEC even tried.

The funny part is that Sun's answer was an  accidental  marketing genius -  because  it became the worlds best add in disk upgrade business for them (diskless Sun's were known as having the lack of male anatomy).

I was leading the networking group at Masscomp at the time, and my team refused to do diskless support - because thought it was a stupid product (there is a infamous email I sent to all of the company with a dyslexic typo in it - which I wish I still had).    I was technically 100% right.    A WS-500 cost $1.5K less that and  equivalent  Sun 3.    But, end users could buy a diskless Sun3 for $2K less than the WS-500. -- only to discover the performance sucked.    So would have to go back to Sun at $5K a crack to get the disk subsystem.

The genius was the sales got the original sale, and you wer not going to through out the Sun3 and get the cheaper system.    You would spend the $5K later and make it better - sigh.

Clem