🚀 go-pugleaf

On 2018-08-14 05:47, terry-...@glaver.org wrote:
> On Monday, August 13, 2018 at 3:48:10 PM UTC-4, Rich Alderson wrote:
>> 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 remember talking to a fellow system administrator at another university who said they were going to an entirely Unix-based environment. When I asked why, he replied "We will have a large choice of which vendor we want to be screwed by".

Yeah, that sounds similar to what I heard/saw. They pretty universally 
went with Unix. VMS never got a foot in the door anywhere at any of 
those sites.

> OTOH, if Jupiter had delivered, my understanding (from the far outside) is that it would have been rather late, unacceptably slow, and extremely non-price-competitive.

That's the story, at least (as I remember it). Jupiter was having 
problems with performance and was way late. It was sharing technology 
with Venus (the 8600). And Venus was also late and had performance 
problems. At one point they decided that the were going to rescue Venus 
at the expense of Jupiter, so they pooled the people and resources in 
order to solve the problems on one side at least.

> Wasn't Jupiter from the (approximately) same part of DEC that produced the VAX 86x0 (missed its performance goals, shipped late) and 8650 (fixing the few remaining problems that cause the 8600 to not operate at the design speed)? And the 8670, which should have been the "mid-life kicker" upgrade for the 8600, assuming it shipped at the design speed? And the same (approximate) group that brought us the VAX 9000 family (repeat mantra of late, slow, expensive)?

Yes. Although, the 8600 didn't miss the performance goals, as far as I 
can remember, but it was *way* late. But as far as I can remember, the 
goal was 4x 11/780, and that is what they achieved.

That said though, since it was delayed so much, one could argue that the 
bar should have been raised from the original plans.

8670 don't ring any bells in my head right now, so I can't comment. The 
9000 was done by the same group though, yes. And while it was fast, and 
I don't know if it was late or not, it was certainly way too expensive, 
and the NVAX came out not long after with the same performance on a 
chip, making the 9000 immediately obsolete.

That was one costly adventure...

My brain keeps saying "LCG", for Large systems computer group, as the 
ones being responsible for those machines, along with PDP-10s. Not sure 
if I'm misremembering something, though.

> It would seem in retrospect that the best thing to do would be to give the Jupiter group some sort of award and stick them in another building where they couldn't do any harm, and then make a deal with one of the many non-DEC vendors that already had fast systems. I know the second part (make a deal with a non-DEC vendor) got at least to the discussion phase, as the meeting minutes are over on Bitsavers.

Cancelling the PDP-10 was maybe a mistake in one sense, but at the same 
time, it's hard to believe that the architecture had much of a future 
anyway, even with all the nice bits.

Ultimately, I suspect it was the right decision to kill it. But DEC did 
it in a really bad way. Making a deal with a non-DEC vendor would have 
been a wise move for the short term.

   Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: b...@softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol