🚀 go-pugleaf

On 2018-08-13 21:48, Rich Alderson wrote:
> 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.)

While I think you are right, in general I think the reflection and 
reaction wasn't hitting the VAX itself that much. But VMS.
I think that DECs attempt at pushing the PDP-10 customers to switch to 
VMS was a total failure, and where people just told DEC to piss off.
I don't know if some might have gone with VAXen, but they most certainly 
did not go with VMS. That was a group of customers who pretty much 
universally went to Unix.

   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