[Info-vax] Unix on A DEC Vax?

[Michael Kraemer]

Bill Gunshannon schrieb:

> Never saw a MIPS that could hold a candle to an Alpha. 

Of course it could.
Mips-based SGI's made it all through the nineties,
and Mips is still alive, whereas Alpha is long dead.

> Alpha
> failed for political reasons, not technical reasons.

There are no "political reasons" here.
Either a product makes money or not.
If the product is too expensive to make
or if too few customers need it, it's dead.

> If the work was done on "one or two central VAXen" why would you need
> a VS3100 at all? 

All kinds of graphic oriented stuff.
For example running LaTeX and viewing the Postscript output.
Bread-and-butter graphics of the Gnuplot type:
enter command in a terminal window, watch gfx in a second
window.
Running some data reduction program with graphical output,
expanding regions of interest via cross hair cursor,
fitting some function to presented data etc etc.
Everything people nowadays do with a PC.
Hard, if not impossible to do with a VTxxx.
Workstations were much more productive in this respect.
And then add the economical aspects.
Central VAXen might have offered more RAM and diskspace,
but as far as compute power goes, they weren't effective.
Back then (1990?) I benchmarked one of our homewritten
number crunchers and found a central VAX 6000 to be
only marginally faster than a lowly VS3100, and a VS3176
easily beat the 6000, at a fraction of the costs.
Not to speak of the upcoming RISC
boxes from both DEC and IBM, which left everything VAX
in the dust.

> There were VXT2000's (which, I guess, are really
> just stripped down VAXStations) and numerous third party X-terminals
> many of which I used that supported DECNet as well as IP.

Iirc X-terminals became popular together with Unix in the early 1990s.
At this point in time, game was already over for VMS.
At the VMS "peak" in the late 1980s, however, I can't remember any
X-terms around. Many people still used VWS rather than DECwindows,
which came later, and the former doesn't run over "X".

>  Nothing
> proprietary from DEC that I ever used showed a serious interest in
> the Desktop or matched the likes of Sun and (at that time a competitor)
> HP.

Again, all those DECwhat-have-you packages were quite popular in the
short period of VMS desktops. One might have found similar apps
on HP and Sun, but that was the 1990s, not the 1980s.