13 Feb
2013
13 Feb
'13
6:52 p.m.
On Feb 13, 2013, at 11:12 AM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
On 2013-02-13 16:09, Clem Cole wrote:
On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 8:08 PM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se
<mailto:bqt at softjar.se>> wrote:
Well, the 11/70 easily outlived the 11/44, in that 11/70 machines
were still sold after the 11/44 was terminated, as far as I know.
Interesting data. I'm a little surprised to hear it because DEC was
clearly trying to get the traditional 11/70 customer to move to the VAX
line in those days.
Oh, DEC tried. It was just that the VAXen didn't deliver the goods for all customers.
The real pain point was realtime stuff. Interrupt latencies on a VAX is horrible compared
to a PDP-11. And VMS don't help.
I still have an RT-32 button from when the RT-11 folks were subversively pushing the
notion that they could make a VAX do realtime.
Fun detail: when devices want to MOP boot on a network where you have both a VAX and a
PDP-11, the PDP-11 normally ends up serving the image, since it responds much faster than
the VAX.
That's because the VMS MOP server did its lookup for a match in the node database by a
linear search. I never could convince the engineer responsible for that code to use a
better algorithm.
paul