[Info-vax] Unix on A DEC Vax?

[Bill Gunshannon]

In article <kdlg5e$fat$1 at solani.org>,
	Michael Kraemer <M.Kraemer at gsi.de> writes:
> 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.

Not for performance reasons.

> 
>> 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.

Do you know anything about the demise of Alpha at all?  Development
stopped over 10 years ago and it is still much in demand.  And, it
maintained a performance lead on pretty much everything for at least
5 years of no development.  Alpha was killed in order to keep it from
competing with Itanium because it was well known among the engineers
that Itanium would never win.  And it hasn't.

> 
>> 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.

Doesn't require a VAXStation, only an X-terminal.

> Everything people nowadays do with a PC.

If only the software that was showing up on PC's actually showed up
on VMS, but alas....

> Hard, if not impossible to do with a VTxxx.

A VTxxx maybe, but not a VTX2000+.  I know, I got one.  And a couple
HP X-terminals, too.  Work great on VMS.

> 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.

My experince has, obviously, been differnt.  My VS3100's are fine
for use at home, but I have a SUN3 that out performs them when it
comes to number crunching.  OK, an exageration, but my SparcStation
definitely beats them.  The primary reason I keep them around is to
run VMS which, the Suns won't run.  :-)

> Not to speak of the upcoming RISC
> boxes from both DEC and IBM, which left everything VAX
> in the dust.

True.

> 
>> 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.

I think there are some people here who might debate that last one
with you. :-)

> 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.
> 
 
bill

-- 
Bill Gunshannon          |  de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n.  Three wolves
billg999 at cs.scranton.edu |  and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
University of Scranton   |
Scranton, Pennsylvania   |         #include <std.disclaimer.h>