someone smarter than Dave Cutler
in [Device Drivers]
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From: Scott Lurndal on 1 Apr 2010 14:51 Mark Crispin <mrc(a)panda.com> writes: >On Thu, 1 Apr 2010, Patrick Scheible posted: >> IBM's competitive advantage was in highly reliable data processing. >> Businesses going with IBM paid a premium for that reliability. > >This reliability was primarily in their peripherals. > >Nobody who ever dealt with any IBM OS would call it reliable. Your bigotry is showing. Tell me again how many commercial enterprises ran their business on PDP-10/20? And the idea that Academe was "dominated" by PDP-10/20 (your words) also is silly. While a few high-profile universities had PDP-10/20 gear, the majority by far didn't (mine had IBM and PCM gear, later supplemented with PDP-11's and VAXen). Does anyone have the actual number of PDP-10's build and shipped along with a breakdown on commercial vs. educational? scott
From: Michael Wojcik on 1 Apr 2010 15:09 Joe Pfeiffer wrote: > > To the best of my recollection, I never saw an IBM computer when I was > an undergrad. DEC-10, VAX, PDP-11, DG Nova, CDC, Harris... yes. IBM, > no. It would be easy to forget how big IBM was, if I were to go from my > own university recollections. And on the other hand, IBM has a long history of putting its boxes in universities - so this really comes down to a question of which university you attended. The Watson Lab at Columbia was established in the '40s, I think, and they had a 360 back in 1968. University of Michigan got theirs in, what, 1967? Actually, I guess that was the Model 67 - they already had a Model 50. And so on. A lot of universities were on BITNET, though that didn't start until 1982, which is rather late by AFC standards (and those of this discussion specifically). -- Michael Wojcik Micro Focus Rhetoric & Writing, Michigan State University
From: Michael Wojcik on 1 Apr 2010 15:18 Jonathan de Boyne Pollard wrote: >> >>> No one knew ho big NT was going to be, and no one knew what the >>> effect of paging kernel code would be. Once there was a running >>> system people could play with it and try out things like that. >>> >> I don't buy this argument. NT was OS/3, and designed squarely to take >> on Novel Netware. >> > ... which didn't have a pageable kernel, either. So your argument isn't > sold, too. (-: AIX 3 has a pageable kernel, so it's not like the technique was unknown among the OSes NT was designed to compete with. > There's a better argument earlier in this thread. I'll repeat it, > because it seems that people have skipped completely over it so that > they can stick with the same "Dave Cutler doesn't know anything." > mindset that they are comfortable with. There are a few good reasons > for not having a pageable kernel that I can see, not the least of which > is that Microsoft is writing an operating system into which third-party > device drivers are loaded. That was the justification for the HAL, and it's possible it was used to justify the non-pageable kernel too. But it's a weak justification. Just keep third-party device drivers pinned if you're worried that they won't handle paging well. You'd still have a mostly-pageable kernel. It's possible to claim that any conservative aspect of NT's design was intentional, to shield the OS from lousy programmers; just as it's possible to claim that any incautious one is a sign that the NT team didn't care about security or robustness. Both are worth considering, but without stronger evidence don't make much of an argument. -- Michael Wojcik Micro Focus Rhetoric & Writing, Michigan State University
From: Mark Crispin on 1 Apr 2010 17:17 On Thu, 1 Apr 2010, Scott Lurndal posted: > Your bigotry is showing. It is not bigotry to observed the proven fact that IBM sucked. > Tell me again how many commercial enterprises > ran their business on PDP-10/20? I personally did business in one form or another with a few hundred that did. I no longer keep all of my contact lists from 30+ years ago. But many of the names would surprise you. For example, they included all of the major Wall Street banks. A lot of these sites also used IBM gear. The one thing that IBM did not suck at doing was for printing paychecks and other such tasks that were ameniable to COBOL batch processing. > And the idea that Academe was "dominated" by PDP-10/20 (your words) > also is silly. While a few high-profile universities had PDP-10/20 > gear, the majority by far didn't (mine had IBM and PCM gear, later > supplemented with PDP-11's and VAXen). I see. You went to the one school that didn't have one, and generalized. Or perhaps you were just not allowed to use a PDP-10. That was the case at Stanford until 1976; ordinary undergraduates were forced to use Wylbur on IBM gear. PDP-10 access was a dainty of faculty, grad students, and the few undergrads who managed to land a job at one of the three facilities. That situation is what finally led to a student march on the computer center and subsequent agreement to buy a PDP-10 that students could use. Similar situations existed elsewhere; undergraduates in the early 1970s weren't considered worthy of being allowed anything more than punch cards. > Does anyone have the actual number of PDP-10's build and shipped > along with a breakdown on commercial vs. educational? Over 3000 PDP-10s were built. That's a lot of mainframes by any account. Barb would know better, but from DECUS attendees it was probably about 60% commercial and 40% educational. Some of the commerical installations (e.g., CompuServe) were huge. -- Mark -- http://panda.com/mrc Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote.
From: Mark Crispin on 1 Apr 2010 17:18
On Thu, 1 Apr 2010, Michael Wojcik posted: > And on the other hand, IBM has a long history of putting its boxes in > universities - so this really comes down to a question of which > university you attended. The Watson Lab at Columbia was established in > the '40s, I think, and they had a 360 back in 1968. Columbia was also a big DEC-20 shop starting in the mid 1970s. Clearly the IBM gear did not address all their computing needs. -- Mark -- http://panda.com/mrc Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to eat for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the vote. |