-----Original Message----- From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE [mailto:owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE] On Behalf Of Johnny Billquist Sent: Monday, February 11, 2013 19:21 To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE Cc: Paul_Koning at Dell.com Subject: Re: [HECnet] NT 4 on AlphaServer es40 On 2013-02-11 22:43, Paul_Koning at Dell.com wrote: On Feb 11, 2013, at 4:38 PM, Mark Benson wrote: On 11 Feb 2013, at 21:02, Dave McGuire wrote: You know DEC, they loved supporting legacy products almost into oblivion. Yes, for GOOD products As much as I'd like to agree, it didn't necessarily work that way round. It was more a case of 'is someone important still using this? Then we best not ditch them or it'll look awfully bad... and they'll go and buy an IBM/DataGeneral/etc.' :) Not even that. For example, shortly after the 11/780 was announced, there was a definite (and, as I recall, explicitly stated) push to drop all PDP-11 support ASAP. For that matter, when IAS was announced, RSTS customers were told that IAS was the future and they should move there right away. Not long after that, IAS was recognized for the boat anchor it was, and it remained an obscure niche product. So DEC definitely had a history of angering customers by attempting to drop support for products that were very much alive and in some cases superior to the alleged replacement. Of course, they sometimes did get it right, as in the example of TRAX... :-) Is this the time I should mention the PDP-10? Talk about making customers angry... :-) Speaking of IAS, it really looks cool when reading specs, but I've never touched it, and another aspect of those specs is that it looks like it would be rather slow... I used to support IAS-11. It ran just fine. Most installations were on PDP-11/70's with full memory. BTW - the NSA and the EPA really liked it! They were the two largest customers in the US. I was the primary support person for both agencies. Other groups outside the US were mostly government based. -Steve Never seen TRAX in real life either, btw. What was so good about it? Johnny -- Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus || on a psychedelic trip email: bqt at softjar.se || Reading murder books pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol