13 Feb
2013
13 Feb
'13
7:12 p.m.
On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 11:12 AM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
DEC let the PDP-11 live as a niche product for small realtime use, where they did
recognize that the VAX just could not compete because of price. But faster and larger
PDP-11 models would have cut into their VAX business, and thus it did not happen, even
though customers wanted.
Oh, how I know. (more in a minute).
Fair enough, but I really think it was a little different as I lived that era. From
talking to them, as I understand it a number of DEC folks in Laboratory Products Division
(LDP) very much wanted the Vax line to be able to sell into the RT business and deal with
some of the issues you expressed. But I don't think DEC was afraid of the 11 moving
up, but more that they started to walk away from the RT business. They wanted the
commercial customer and with the VAX they were starting to be competitive there and
basically stopped investing.
I was one of the early Masscomp guys, which was made up a lot of folks who had been in
LDP, a number of ex-CPU guys from Vax (780, 750, 730), and the PDP-11 (at least the 34), a
number of ex-DEC SW types who had done RSX, RT11, VMS, the compilers etc. Masscomp
built the first Real Time Unix machine (and the first commercial UNIX multiprocessor but
that's another story). The sales guys were always trying to get us to add RSX or
RT11 "features" (inc DECNet) We did build ASTs but never did QIO, although
tjt did build a solution that offered the same effect with slightly different semantics.
I'm the one that blocked DECnet and said - IP/TCP was the way to go (which would
prove to be the right choice).
But the real key was when Masscomp got a number of the old DEC compiler team back together
and built the original Masscomp FORTRAN compiler what could accept VMS FTN syntax, we
never lost a competitive sale to RSX (or RT11), and usually beat the Vaxen of that day
[and was always why we were 10-20% faster than Sun for the longest time using the same
10Mhz 68000 chip - we had a better compiler].
I remember that around that time we got a nasty gram from KO [I wonder who has that letter
these days].
Dave Cane (who had been the 750 lead) once said that the MC-500 (the original Masscomp
machine) was what he had hope the 750 could have been; but DEC would not let him.
Anyway - my point is that it was the compilers, more than the HW or the OS that actually
was the key feature the traditional RT customer really care about -- no matter if it
was a VAX and 11 or one of the 68K base systems; and what DEC did was lose focus for that
customer - hence the value of doing some of the things you mentioned was lost.
Clem