Re: off-by-five error [Re: Outpost, egreetings, sparks, iprint,and why

(no name) ((no email))
Wed, 10 Feb 1999 14:22:34 -0600

> >2. There is no 11/74.
>
> This was to be a hot four-processor 11/70 that got killed because it would
> have eventually been clobbered by the 11/780... the 16 bit PDPs were an
> evolutionary dead end, and DEC decided to save the resources by killing off
> the heroically high end non-VAX PDPs at this point.
>

Mostly. I believe there actually was an 11/74 in the lab. But, it never saw
the light of commercial day, like almost everything else DEC did. Sorry, cheap
shot.

But the 11/70-74 weren't the end of the line for the venerable PDP-11. They
were the end of big, discrete component, MASSBUS PDPs. Along about that time,
DEC was getting really good at chip design/fab, and they came out with the F-11
and then the J-11 processor chips. Micro-PDP-11s. And Micro-RSX to run on
them, not to mention P/OS (Pile/OfShit) for the DecProfessionals. (IBM, not to
be outdone in the acronym department, came out with their own PileofShit, Too.)
Not to be confused with Pointlessness Of Sales terminals.

There followed several more new PDP-11 systems: 11/53, 11/73, 11/83, 11/84,
11/93 and 11/94 (I think - this is a closed-mind exam). The X3 systems are
QBUS, the X4s are UNIBUS. As late as 94, I believe, PDPs were still a $1B/year
product for DEC. I'm certain I still have code running in refineries and
newspapers on old PDP-11/44s, 11/34s, 11/35s, 11/05s, ...

Cheers,
Wayne

> ABO MCR...
ABO -- Task not abortable

http://www-oss.fnal.gov/~baisley