[Info-vax] Attaching an actual 3.5" floppy drive to SIMH-VAX RXV21 device?

[John Wallace]

On Aug 17, 8:38 am, Paul Sture <nos... at sture.ch> wrote:
> On Thu, 16 Aug 2012 17:39:30 -0500, Doug Phillips wrote:
> > On 8/16/2012 4:22 PM, David Froble wrote:
> >> Doug Phillips wrote:
>
> >>> The 3100's were good sellers until the Alpha came along.
>
> >> Could be wrong, but I remember the MicroVAX 3100 Model 98 to be a bood
> >> seller right up to the time they were removed from the market.  That
> >> was long after Alpha came along.
>
> > Yes, I should have said good sellers "for us" until Alpha. There were
> > people who needed VAX for one reason or another, but not for our
> > software. I've never had the privilege of working with a 3100-98.
>
> How did the graphics cards on the 3100-98s compare with those supplied
> with the early Alphas?
>
> That may sound like an apple and oranges question, but when I had a
> 3100-38 I could happily use VNC on it to control a PC, but my PWS 600au
> with an Elsa Gloria card gave unacceptable response times using VNC into
> the same PC.
> --
> Paul Sture

Was the PWS running VMS or was it a Window box? If it happens to have
been NT, there were lots of sub-optimal things in the NT(s) that the
nice Mr Gates released for Alpha. Still, some people liked it for some
applications, for a while.

The Elsa Gloria in this picture was probably also a PCI card (probably
32bit PCI33, I forget) which means it's relatively a long way from
processor and memory, which can't be ideal for performance.

Final point: not all graphics cards are equally good at different
kinds of graphics. Watching text scroll through treacle on a ZLXp-E3
(?) was not good, but watching it do 3D stuff could be quite
impressive in its day.