someone smarter than Dave Cutler
in [Device Drivers]
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From: glen herrmannsfeldt on 1 Apr 2010 17:51 In alt.sys.pdp10 Mark Crispin <mrc(a)panda.com> wrote: (snip) > 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. The school I went to had a PDP-10 (later replaced by VAX) for student use. (That is, free student accounts.) The 370/158 required real money, so was mostly used by faculty for research projects, though also by students for class work. I was used to OS/360 (and WYLBUR) before then, but not at all to the PDP-10. > Similar situations existed elsewhere; undergraduates in the early 1970s > weren't considered worthy of being allowed anything more than punch cards. There were two choices for 370 batch. One was cards, the other was job submission from the PDP-10. (There was no path back to the 10.) When the line printer of the PDP-10 died, the spooler was converted to spool through to the 370. -- glen
From: Charles Richmond on 1 Apr 2010 18:05 Joe Pfeiffer wrote: > Peter Flass <Peter_Flass(a)Yahoo.com> writes: > >> jmfbahciv wrote: >>> Jim Stewart wrote: >>>> Mark Crispin wrote: >>>>> On Tue, 30 Mar 2010, Jim Stewart posted: >>>>>> Anyone that takes the time to leaf through some >>>>>> Datamation magazines of that era would be lucky >>>>>> to find any reference to PDP-10's. >>>>> Using Datamation as an historical reference is like using the >>>>> National Enquirier. >>>> A circular religious argument not unexpected from >>>> someone that believed that PDP-10's dominated the >>>> era. >>>> >>>> >>> You, obviously, have had no experience in non-IBM niches. >>> >>> /BAH >> Bill Clinton would love this. I guess it depends on what your >> definition of "dominated" is. Certainly -10's were popular in >> universities and research organizations. On the other hand, in 40 >> years I encountered exactly *one* -10, at a timesharing outfit. >> Naturally I loved it, but there weren't many out in the real world. > > I'm a little bit reminded of the days when just about everybody used > ASCII except IBM -- which meant something like 90% of the computers in > the world used EBCDIC. > > 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. How can a university with a business school *not* have an IBM 370 or clone back in the 1970's??? That is the computer that the COBOL programmers would be *most* likely to use out in the business world. The biggest part of computing at my university was done on an IBM 370. That included the business dept., math dept., engineering dept., physics dept., and chemistry dept. -- +----------------------------------------+ | Charles and Francis Richmond | | | | plano dot net at aquaporin4 dot com | +----------------------------------------+
From: Charles Richmond on 1 Apr 2010 18:11 jmfbahciv wrote: > Peter Flass wrote: >> jmfbahciv wrote: >>> Jim Stewart wrote: >>>> Mark Crispin wrote: >>>>> On Tue, 30 Mar 2010, Jim Stewart posted: >>>>>> Anyone that takes the time to leaf through some >>>>>> Datamation magazines of that era would be lucky >>>>>> to find any reference to PDP-10's. >>>>> >>>>> Using Datamation as an historical reference is like using the >>>>> National Enquirier. >>>> >>>> A circular religious argument not unexpected from >>>> someone that believed that PDP-10's dominated the >>>> era. >>>> >>>> >>> You, obviously, have had no experience in non-IBM niches. >>> >>> /BAH >> >> Bill Clinton would love this. I guess it depends on what your >> definition of "dominated" is. Certainly -10's were popular in >> universities and research organizations. On the other hand, in 40 >> years I encountered exactly *one* -10, at a timesharing outfit. >> Naturally I loved it, but there weren't many out in the real world. > > And I'm counting all the individuals who had exposure to a computer. > If they all had to drop off card decks and come back a week later > to pick up the erroneous results, most would have considered > the biz as a required PITA instead of fun. > > /BAH Amen, BAH! But to be fair, our IBM 370 did run APL/360 and had *some* interactive access. Plus there was terminal usage through WYLBUR, an interactive editing and job submission utility. WYLBUR had a little 4GL called EXEC that one could use for housekeeping tasks. I liked using the DEC-20 and it was all the better because *most* computing was done on the IBM. Less competition for access. At the college I attended, the IBM 370 used EBCDIC of course. But *all* ther terminals were ASCII terminals and the "terminal concentrator" had to translate back and forth. We had quite a few DECWriters (LA-36's I think) and I *loved* the keyboard on those!!! Just the right spring tension under each key. -- +----------------------------------------+ | Charles and Francis Richmond | | | | plano dot net at aquaporin4 dot com | +----------------------------------------+
From: Scott Lurndal on 1 Apr 2010 18:22 Mark Crispin <mrc(a)panda.com> writes: >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. No. I visited a large number of schools in the 70's in the midwest and none of them had PDP-10's. Considering that there were over 3000 non-profit colleges and universities at that point in history, and give your 40% number and assuming that there was only one PDP-10 at each of the (40% of 3000 is 1200). Assuming that many of the PDP-10 sites had more than one system further reduces the absolute number of colleges and universities that had PDP-10 systems to less than 1000. > >Or perhaps you were just not allowed to use a PDP-10. Actually, since I worked for the comp center as an undergrad and postgrad, I was allowed to use pretty much anything they had. > >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. There were more burroughs medium systems (B2500/B3500/B4700) built than that, and burroughs was definitely second tier. That's not counting the B3800/B4800/B2900/B3900/B4900/V300/V500's that followed through the rest of the 70s, 80s and 90s. They were far easier to use than IBM iron, but not timesharing powerhouses. scott
From: Scott Lurndal on 1 Apr 2010 18:23
Mark Crispin <mrc(a)panda.com> writes: >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. > The second doesn't follow from the first. scott |