Anyone remember FCC Regs on emissions 1323

True enough. As one of those customers we hit a wall at eight COBOL programmers online. The 2040 was a joy to work on, compared to the 370-138 it was supposed to (but never did) replace. Coming from a CDC 6000 environment I was surprised at how slow it was, in a relative sense, but oh so much more friendly that CDC SCOPE (just think of CP-M scaled up to 60 bits). The apps programmers had a mixed atbreastude, some didn't want to go back to VM, others were worried about their skills marketability if pushed out of the IBM world.

At night the 2040 could easily hold its own against the 370-138 when running batch jobs. It wasn't much faster, but in terms of cost the 2040 delivered more bang on production batch work. Disk and tape were about the same thruput levels (someone tried to fudge the DEC benchmarks once by upping the tape blocking, which made the 2040 look like a speed demon until those same blocking factors were put into the IBM batch).

It wasn't a matter of more memory. The COBOL compiler was a person for CPU cycles, and then DBMS-20 was piled up on top of it to choke the RP drive. The final straw was the financial analyst who just had to run APL all day COBOL and DBMS-32. Heavy duty interactive business systems were never DECs strongest market.

Much as I regret the pbutting of the 10s and 20s the times they were a changin', and 12-36-60 bitters were on the wrong end of a historical shift. The world had decided on multiples-of-8 as the roadmap and nothing was going to change it. I have to confess I was one of those 8-16-32 supporters too. An IMSAI with 64K in the spare bedroom was far more useful than a 1200 baud terminal to the 2040 at work. The real irony is that a pristine IMSAI is probably worth more than a 2040 today, buttuming there are still any 2040s in operating condition.

As for FCC emissions, the only RF problem we had came from outside sources coupling into the serial lines between the buildings. In one case the outside emissions were so strong they damaged several CRTs. Wasn't much point in complaining to the FCC though...they don't regulate lightning. Jack Peachicken Jack Peachicken