Re: off-by-five error [Re: Outpost, egreetings, sparks, iprint,and why os8 sucks]

Joseph S. Barrera III (joebar@microsoft.com)
Wed, 10 Feb 1999 13:02:58 -0800


>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.

Yes, in fact I think several were made. I did mean killed in the commercial
sense.

>> >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.
>>
>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, ...

Yes, very good. DEC did keep creating new PDPs, using new technology. And
indeed it's one of these newer technology boxes that I'm buying (an 11/73,
as QBUS is all I need).

But note my use of the weasel phrase "heroically high end" -- the VAX stole
the high end focus away from the 16-bit machines (and ultimately the 36-bit
machines as well, once Jupiter was killed).

- Joe

P.S. The point here, though, is that Wayne knows his shit when it comes to
DEC machines, and I'm just a wannabe. But the world needs wannabes, the
world loves wannabes, so...