[Info-vax] Internationalization

[Scott Dorsey]

=?UTF-8?Q?Arne_Vajh=c3=b8j?=  <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>
>I have no idea about how a Prime computer technically
>stacked up against contemporary VAX'es.

Less elegant.  They had mode bits and several different instruction sets
and would have to switch between them on the fly.  But general I/O performance
was very good.  They did better than the vax in timesharing systems, with
more users per MIPS and likely more users per dollar.  But the OS was quite
comparatively crude and even things like typahead buffers were problematic.
IP support was even worse than VMS at the time, and they were very heavily
into X.25 (which was very well integrated into the OS).

>But VAX'es sold well.

Yes.  The vax was a great machine, it was in that range between the typical
mini and the mainframe and that was a very unfulfilled market at the time.

>In 1988 Prime had revenue of 0.6 B$ and DEC has revenue
>of 13 B$. That is a factor 20 difference.

Yes, but Pr1me only had a couple products, really only one series of systems,
while DEC had a million products, some of which were in competition with one
another.

>The world was VMS friendly in those years.

Back then, people bought the hardware and they got the operating system that
came along with the hardware, rather than the other way around.  VMS is really
kind of a clumsy system for student use and for engineering use; the complex
filesystem that is such a huge win in commercial applications becomes more
of a pain than a help.  But the machine was so good, and so cheap for what you
got, that people used it for plenty of things it wasn't appropriate for.

Mind you this goes for Pr1me and Data General, Computer Automation, and a 
million other mini companies at the time the vax came out.  And it went for
Convex and Sequent and Flex and Alliant and million other supermini companies
at the time the vax was replaced by Alpha.  DEC was not alone.

>But unless it was an IBM only company, then VMS was
>probably almost always considered. And as a consequence
>it was often picked.
>
>For good reasons or for bad reasons.

Don't look at me, I was promoting BRL Unix for the 11/780s.  Great OS.
--scott
-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."