[Info-vax] Dave Cutler, Prism, DEC, Microsoft, etc.

[Bill Gunshannon]

In article <paul.nospam-4E1444.20135910122009 at pbook.sture.ch>,
	Paul Sture <paul.nospam at sture.ch> writes:
> In article <IweRJQ32IoED at eisner.encompasserve.org>,
>  koehler at eisner.nospam.encompasserve.org (Bob Koehler) wrote:
> 
>> In article <7o7aptF3osjr8U2 at mid.individual.net>, billg999 at cs.uofs.edu (Bill 
>> Gunshannon) writes:
>> > 
>> > Auditor would have had a field day with that one.  Contract should have
>> > been re-competed as the two are hardly equivalent and there actuall is
>> > no such thing as a PDP-VAX.  I can't believe there wasn't a protest filed.
>> 
>>    Cost of the 8 11/70 vs. cost of the 8 11/780 was a tiny part of the
>>    contract.  I don't know if they created justification for a protest,
>>    but when I came on the job I was sure glad to be using VAXen.
> 
> One customer who was being funded by EU money was under intense pressure 
> to buy an ICL system, but "Must run XYZ software" where "XYZ" only ran 
> on VMS got them a pair of 11/780s, which was what they really wanted.
> 

That worked both ways.  A company I was working for once lost a bid to DEC
(we were bidding Primes) even though the machine DEC was bidding didn't
even exist and while we ran all the required benchmarks and delivered boxes
of fanfold paper with the results DEC provided a letter that said what the
box would do, if it actually existed.  They won after we withdrew after
hearing the contract representative say, "I don't care who wins as long 
as long as it says VAX on the front of tthe box."  We got the last laugh,
DEC was bidding VMS and the site wanted the box to run all   the free
software they were going to get from Kitt Peak Observatory.  Yes, it was
all BSD Unix software!!

bill