[HECnet] DECnet-RT?

[Gregg Levine]

Hello!
This is is spooky. We before Compaq glommed DEC, or even HP glomming
the Compaq that erupted after doing that, DEC and Apple threw an
amazing joint trade show here in Manhattan on the subject of
networking together the Mac family of machines and VAXen. They
remembered to name the machines, one VAX wore the name VAX Masterson.
And one vendor was Allen Bradley who had someone there promoting
factory level automation for both the VAX and the PDP-11.

I found out towards the end of the show that it was indeed a variety
of DECNet gluing everyone together.
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Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."

On Fri, Mar 27, 2020 at 7:22 PM Robert Armstrong <bob at jfcl.com> wrote:
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> >CMU's Mellon Institute built a system originally for the Pittsburgh Press
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>   FWIW, I worked for DEC in the Indianapolis Field Application Center, and we built and wrote software for process automation and factory management systems under contract to GM/Delco.  At the time the Delco semiconductor FAB in Kokomo IN had the largest class 100 clean room in the world, even bigger than anything here in Silicon Valley.  Interesting place – it was basically a five story building, with two stories underground and three above ground.  Only the ground floor was usable work space – the remaining floors were filled up with air handling machinery.
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>   Anyway, the factory automation was done with LSI-11/23+s and VAX=11/780s and 8600s.  The VAXes ran VMS of course, and the =11s were diskless and ran RSX=11S downloaded from the VAXes.  All communication was done with DECnet task-to-task, programmed explicitly using $QIOs in the software.  The -11 stuff was mostly written in MACRO-11, and the VAX code was written in PL/I (yes, PL/I – it was the customer’s requirement.  Don’t think I ever knew why).
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>   About the 11s being diskless – that wasn’t a cost issue, although keeping all the packs updated would have been an administration headache.  In most of the factory Delco was afraid that dirt, grime and gunk would get into the drives and crash them.  In the FAB, however, Delco was worried that a disk crash would let oxide particles escape and those would contaminate their clean room.  Either way, disk drives were a no-no.
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> Bob