[Info-vax] Reading Gordon Bell's VAX strategy document

[John Dallman]

In article <ueph3e$lj1$1 at news.misty.com>, bqt at softjar.se (Johnny
Billquist) wrote:

> What you could possibly argue was that DEC didn't enough see or 
> anticipate the drop in price of memory, which would lead to totally 
> different constraints and optimal points.

Indeed. Nor did they look at the history of the art of making computers
faster. The VAX architecture was implemented readily enough at first, but
made pipelining, out-of-order and other ideas that had been invented in
the 1950s and 1960s hard to add. 

> VMS was never expected to run on something with 64K. You couldn't 
> even run a reasonable PDP-11 on that little memory at that point. 
> (I said responable, for anyone dragging out a minimal RT-11 system.)

I agree it seems crazy, but that's what the paper says, on page 14:

  . . . a range of 64 Kbytes of RAM and ROM for VMS in the terminal 
  to as much as 32 Mbytes in the large configuration . . . 

John