🚀 go-pugleaf

John Levine <jo...@taugh.com> writes:

> In article <0897e059-0b26-4334...@googlegroups.com>,
> Quadibloc  <jsa...@ecn.ab.ca> wrote:

>> I think it was ugly too; but I suppose that it could still be said that if
>> the memory expansion method actually used was a kludge, that doesn't prove
>> th at something better might not be possible.

> The people who did it were pretty smart.  An obvious alternative would be a
> mode bit, like 16 vs 32 bit segments on the 386, and different instruction
> formats, but if it's not backward compatible with 18 bit code, you might as
> well switch to a Vax, which is what everyone did.

Speaking from personal experience here, no, that's not what they did.

Most PDP-10 customers (where that's a cover term for the entire line) were so
pissed at Digital for the Jupiter cancellation that when they moved off of the
36-bit architecture, they went with anything available which wasn't a Digital
product.

I can say this as the former sales support manager for the manufacturer of an
extended clone of the KL-10 processor in the DECSYSTEM-20.  When we brought the
XKL Toad-1 System to market in 1996, the VP of sales and I did a phone survey
of every potential customer he had ever spoken to, and learned just how many
systems had been decommissioned in the preceding 12 months in favor of one or
another high-end Unix offering or IBM system.  Almost none of them had gone to
VMS or OSF/1 on Alpha (by then, Digital's only hardware offering).

(NB:  Translating titles above, I was the entire customer/sales support
 organization at the time, and he was the entire sales force.  We expected to
 grow.)

-- 
Rich Alderson					  ne...@alderson.users.panix.com
      Audendum est, et veritas investiganda; quam etiamsi non assequamur,
	  omnino tamen proprius, quam nunc sumus, ad eam perveniemus.
									--Galen