The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
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From: david20 on 30 Mar 2007 09:15 In article <574ejhF2bg1n6U2(a)mid.individual.net>, =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Jan_Vorbr=FCggen?= <jvorbrueggen(a)not-mediasec.de> writes: >> VMS and Tru64 users have long since learned that published roadmaps are not >> worth the paper you would waste printing them out. > >Alpha users, yes. VMS - why would you say that? Oh, you mean you had to >"migrate" to a new processor? So what - everytime you "upgrade" a Microsoft >OS, you need to move to a new processor, and there's not much help in keeping >your existing data in a useable state, because the "upgrade" is mostly >"install and copy". > Sorry maybe I should have said Alpha VMS and TRU64 users. However since Tru64 only ever ran on Alpha and we were talking about Alpha chip roadmaps I thought it an unnecessary qualification. As to HP's current roadmaps for Itanium. Given Itaniums position in the marketplace vis-a-vis x86-64 and the fact that one reason given for the Alphacide was that COMPAQ/HP wanted to consolidate all their systems onto a single chip architecture. It would be naive of any VMS Alpha user to place too much faith in HP's Itanium roadmaps. David Webb Security team leader CCSS Middlesex University > Jan
From: Nick Maclaren on 30 Mar 2007 09:18 In article <pan.2007.03.30.13.08.03.59086(a)areilly.bpc-users.org>, Andrew Reilly <andrew-newspost(a)areilly.bpc-users.org> writes: |> |> > None of those could hold a candle to the PDP-11 for peripheral driving |> > of the sort I am referring to. My colleagues tried all of them, and |> > had major difficulties getting round their restrictions. |> |> That's an interesting assertion. How so? All three were |> close-to-unpipelined 16-bit processors with about eight general purpose |> registers (double-ish on the 68k), running at a few MHz, and similar |> sorts of OS support (not counting some instruction restart failure that |> turned out to be in the 68k), and a very simple, traditional vectored |> interrupt scheme. What makes the -11 better? DMA bus-mastering in the |> peripherals? Not in the LSI-11 box that I got to use. I can imagine |> heroic peripheral designs if you really wanted that sort of thing, but I |> reckon that one of the other micros would have done as well with the same |> setup. In some cases, it was reliability. In other cases, it was the interfaces they supported. In others, it was details of the interrupt mechanism and/or scheduling. I can't tell you the details, as I was not directly involved. If I recall, in the case of the LSI-11, it was the last two; inter alia, it did not support some of the interfaces needed and the interrupt handling had some difference that caused trouble. What I can tell you is that none of the people I knew (and not just the ones here) migrated from their PDP-11s until they really had to, and the LSI-11 was not regarded as an adequate substitute. Regards, Nick Maclaren.
From: jmfbahciv on 30 Mar 2007 09:15 In article <mddd52rx59j.fsf(a)panix5.panix.com>, Rich Alderson <news(a)alderson.users.panix.com> wrote: >jmfbahciv(a)aol.com writes: > >> In article <716n03dfp130mbs5bge8tbknp4v78sh1pa(a)4ax.com>, >> Brian Inglis <Brian.Inglis(a)SystematicSW.Invalid> wrote: >>> fOn 27 Mar 2007 08:43:47 GMT in alt.folklore.computers, >>> nmm1(a)cus.cam.ac.uk (Nick Maclaren) wrote: > >>>> In article <byrnsj-FDFD08.19484226032007(a)newsclstr02.news.prodigy.com>, >>>> John Byrns <byrnsj(a)sbcglobal.net> writes: > >>>>|> I always thought DEC should have extended the PDP-11 to 32 bits and >>>>|> skipped the VAX. The PDP-11 was a very elegant design whose fatal flaw >>>>|> was its 16 bitness, while the VAX seemed overly complex to me. > >>>> The PDP-11 never made much impact as a 'general' computer, especially >>>> in the commercial arena, whereas the PDP-10 and PDP-20 did. The VAX >>>> was intended to capture the latter market and, in the research arena, >>>> it did. > >>> They did a good commercial business with 11/70s running RSTS/E, IAS, >>> RSX-11D as departmental minis, but growing companies wanting to get away >>> from file processing, use databases, handle more users and functions, >>> without proliferating machine counts, had no growth path with Digital. > >> Of course they did. Why do you think we sold PDP-10s? > >I had those conversations with -11 folks at DECUS. > >From the point of view of PDP-11 users, the PDP-10 was *not* a viable >replacement. You were talking about a growth path. That is not the same as a replacement. >They wanted 8-bit bytes and power-of-2 words, and nothing was >going to change their minds about that. Then customers would continue to buy -11s and move the boring grunt work to the -10s and their secretaries. /BAH
From: jmfbahciv on 30 Mar 2007 09:17 In article <euggeu$92m$1(a)gemini.csx.cam.ac.uk>, nmm1(a)cus.cam.ac.uk (Nick Maclaren) wrote: > >In article <eugf8g$8qk_003(a)s879.apx1.sbo.ma.dialup.rcn.com>, >jmfbahciv(a)aol.com writes: >|> >|> >|> They did a good commercial business with 11/70s running RSTS/E, IAS, >|> >|> RSX-11D as departmental minis, but growing companies wanting to get away >|> >|> from file processing, use databases, handle more users and functions, >|> >|> without proliferating machine counts, had no growth path with Digital. >|> > >|> >Yes, they did, but those sales had far less impact than their numbers >|> >imply. I don't know precisely why - the above may be one reason, and >|> >another may have been that a lot of them were sold into the very laid >|> >back (a.k.a. happy hacker) end of the market, which was and is very >|> >volatile. >|> >|> It could be the way DEC tracked the sales. PDP-10 product line >|> never got any "credit" for all the minis it sold. > >I was actually thinking from the customer end, but cannot say which >was the chicken and which the egg. Neither could DEC managmeent and their bean counters. They ended up ignoring that (I can never remember the correct value) somewhere between 60-70% of the mini customers also had at least one PDP-10. Most had more. /BAH
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler on 30 Mar 2007 09:34
krw <krw(a)att.bizzzz> writes: > FS wasn't the big problem. No income was a a far bigger problem. > The economy of the mid '70s was horrid. With inflation going into > the double digits it takes some pair to lay out a few megabux on > blinkin' lights. re: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#11 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits? Huge amount of money was spent on FS project ... and while everybody was distracted by FS project ... there weren't a lot of people minding the 370 store ... and then with the death of FS ... there was enormous amount of scurring about trying to make up for lost time ... trying to get stuff into the 370 pipeline (to market/sell) from http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ starting with http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/history/decade_1970.html yr revenue net 70 7.5b 1.01b 71 8.27b 1.07b 72 9.53b 1.27b 73 10.99b 1.57b 74 12.67b 1.83b 75 14.43b 1.99b 76 16.3b 2.39b 77 18.13b 2.71b 78 21.07b 3.11b 79 22.86b 3.01b and 92 64.52b -4.96b and comment about product for gov. agencies, some of it was possibly related to http://www.nsa.gov/selinux/list-archive/0409/8362.cfm above science center reference is of course 545 tech sq http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech also Boyd ran NKP ("spook base") 72-73 ... in one of Boyd biographies, it mentioned that it represeted a $2.5B "windfall" for IBM past posts mentioning $2.5B windfall http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005m.html#22 Old Computers and Moisture don't mix - fairly OT http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005m.html#23 Old Computers and Moisture don't mix - fairly OT http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005m.html#24 Old Computers and Moisture don't mix - fairly OT http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005t.html#1 Dangerous Hardware http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006q.html#37 Was FORTRAN buggy? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006q.html#38 Was FORTRAN buggy? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006u.html#49 Where can you get a Minor in Mainframe? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006u.html#50 Where can you get a Minor in Mainframe? http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006x.html#18 The Future of CPUs: What's After Multi-Core? misc. collected posts mentioning Boyd: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subboyd.html#boyd and URLs from around the web mentioning Boyd: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subboyd.html#boyd2 |