[Info-vax] Vaxes shutting off this week

[Richard B. Gilbert]

Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> In article <goevqd$a2o$2 at pcls4.std.com>,
> 	moroney at world.std.spaamtrap.com (Michael Moroney) writes:
>> billg999 at cs.uofs.edu (Bill Gunshannon) writes:
>>
>>> In article <goeb8m$fr6$2 at pcls6.std.com>,
>>> 	moroney at world.std.spaamtrap.com (Michael Moroney) writes:
>>>>>   Hmm.. I wonder what would have happened had VAX continued on the path 
>>>>>   and then did what all of the other processors had to do get more 
>>>>>   through-put, go multi-core with more front-end cache...
>>>>>   Hmm.. I wonder what would have happened had PDP-11 continued on the path 
>>>>>   and then did what all of the other processors had to do get more 
>>>>>   through-put, go multi-core with more front-end cache...
>>>> A big difference is that the PDP and the VAX ran their courses and were
>>>> discontinued at an appropiate time.  
>>> Some people might not agree with that notion.  PDP-11 development was
>>> continued long after Dec sold it off to Mentec.  And I mean processor
>>> development, not just OS and software support.  And many people here
>>> have suggested that while Alpha was a great idea there was a place for
>>> VAX to continue as well.  The world never went completely RISC and the
>>> VAX was probably better than any other non-RISC processor.
>> Somewhat supports my claim.  The PDP-11 was allowed to make money for
>> pretty much as long as it was able to, for somebody.  
> 
> And longer except the current owners have decided not to deal with it
> anymore.  Much to the lament of more people than I can count who are
> still using PDP-11's everyday fro real work.
> 
>>                                                       But being restricted
>> to 64K of memory at once is a big restriction, except for smaller control
>> modules. 
> 
> Hmmm...  Let's see.  As recently as about 10 years ago I went out to
> Joisey to pick up a bunch of RA disks.  The place I went to had converted
> all their data storage over to SCSI. They were, however, still happily
> running all of their business on PDP-11's.  They were (are?) one of the
> largest mortgage brokerage firms on the east coast.  Doing it all on RSTS.
> There are a lot of things other than "smaller control modules" that can
> still be done quite effectively on less hardware than a Cray.
> 
>>            (how much memory is really needed for a computer-controlled 
>> traffic light even with lots of sensors to operate?  How about your
>> microwave?)  
> 
> Well, most of my PDP-11's actually have 2-4 Meg of memory and handle it
> within the 64K space quite well.  Even UCSD-Pascal could do "virtual
> arrays" making them limited by disk space rather than memory size.  Also,
> with overlays program size isn't much of a problem either.  I may not
> be able to render the graphics for "Jurasic Park" on my PDP-11, but there
> are a lot of businesses that would find more than enough horsepower in
> one.
> 
>>              The VAX was a great non-RISC instruction set and was widely
>> taught between the PDP-11 era and when x86 PCs were so ubiquitous.
> 
> And, just think how the VAXen we know an love would perform if all we
> did was make the processor using todays technology.  Any guess at how
> fast they might be?

They would be faster.  They still wouldn't be able to keep up with 
today's RISC architectures!