someone smarter than Dave Cutler
in [Device Drivers]
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From: jmfbahciv on 2 Apr 2010 10:34 Scott Lurndal wrote: > 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). That having -11s and VAXen shows the results of the PDP-10 influence. > > Does anyone have the actual number of PDP-10's build and shipped > along with a breakdown on commercial vs. educational? There were enough so that the first computer exposure which hundreds of thousands had was the PDP-10 which gave each one of them the notion that they had their own personal machine. /BAH
From: Mark Crispin on 2 Apr 2010 11:53 On Thu, 2 Apr 2010, Scott Lurndal posted: > FWIW, the school I chose _invented_ the digital computer. It also has a very > well respected Vet Med college. Bell Labs does not have have a Vet Med college. The digital computer was invented by George R. Stibitz in 1940. Now, if you went to Dartmouth and were confused by Stibitz's affiliation there, then perhaps you are also unaware that Dartmouth had PDP-10s. -- 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: Scott Lurndal on 2 Apr 2010 12:13 Mark Crispin <mrc(a)panda.com> writes: >On Thu, 2 Apr 2010, Scott Lurndal posted: >> FWIW, the school I chose _invented_ the digital computer. It also has a very >> well respected Vet Med college. > >Bell Labs does not have have a Vet Med college. > >The digital computer was invented by George R. Stibitz in 1940. Please read up on John Vincent Atanasoff in the mid 1930's, particularly the visit by E&M during that period in which they were introduced to several concepts that ended up in Eniac. Note also the court case in the 1970's Honeywell v. Sperry. > >Now, if you went to Dartmouth and were confused by Stibitz's affiliation >there, then perhaps you are also unaware that Dartmouth had PDP-10s. My bio is around if you look for it. scott
From: Michael Wojcik on 2 Apr 2010 13:07 Mark Crispin wrote: > > Nobody who ever dealt with any IBM OS would call it reliable. And Mark drifts once more into the absurd hyperbole zone. -- Michael Wojcik Micro Focus Rhetoric & Writing, Michigan State University
From: Michael Wojcik on 2 Apr 2010 13:19
Mark Crispin wrote: > 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. Sure. Most schools with strong computing labs / programs had equipment from multiple vendors. > Clearly the IBM gear did not address all their computing needs. So? Did someone claim otherwise? -- Michael Wojcik Micro Focus Rhetoric & Writing, Michigan State University |