[Info-vax] OT: About Digital and divisions

[Richard B. Gilbert]

On 11/28/2011 12:47 PM, Bill Pechter wrote:
> In article<jaj164$5as$1 at speranza.aioe.org>,
> glen herrmannsfeldt<gah at ugcs.caltech.edu>  wrote:
>> Neil Rieck<n.rieck at sympatico.ca>  wrote:
>>
>> (snip)
>>> You are correct (sort of). Woz was out (at Apple) because he was
>>> pushed out of the way by Jobs after Woz crashed his plane then ended
>>> up in hospital with amnesia. When Woz returned to Apple, he was pushed
>>> back into the 8-bit division. I find it amusing when people still
>>> criticize the OPEN/CLOSED argument.
>>
>> (snip)
>>> Wozniak was 100% correct and the Mac would be in a very different
>>> place Apple had allowed the world-wide computer industry to partner
>>> with them rather than compete with them. The same case could be made
>>> of Digital by the way. Digital raised the technical bar so-high that
>>> one very rarely saw third party devices plugged into a PDP or VAX
>>> (although it happened all the time at my penny-pinching company).
>>> Third party devices were more common in Alpha (since that platform
>>> relied upon COTS technology) but the wakeup call was (IMHO) too
>>> little, too late.
>>
>> Well, using non-DEC terminals wasn't all that rare, though many
>> that I knew did use DEC terminals.  For remote dial-up, though,
>> you used what you had.
>>
>> Other than that, though, yes, likely rare.  Did anyone use
>> non-DEC disks with VAX?   For PDP-11 it seems more common to
>> use other disk systems.
>>
>> -- glen
>
> Systems Industries put a lot of disks out on their 9900 (IIRC) subsystem
> using CDC9766's on their own SBI interfaces.  They sold pretty well to
> Government customers... Fort Monmouth had some as did the FBI.
>
> Bill
>

The company I worked for bought a disk farm from EMC^2. I forget just
how much storage it had but it was at least  a couple of hundred GB!  We 
didn't have any VAXen left but our Alpha systems used the EMC^2.  Just 
about everything was stored in the EMC^2.  This was ca. 2003-2004.