Anyone remember FCC Regs on emissions was Tops10 disk quota quandary 1332

Well, the BSD that Ultrix was based on just came out in 81 or 82. I suspect it took a long time for the DEC guys to officially sanction a "Unix" release in the VAX-VMS only world back then.

I think it was a special systems thing getting BSD 4.2 first. Or maybe DEC shipping 32v or SysIII to some places. Most sites running Unix bought direct from AT&T.

The VAX9000 was a mess. They announced it after the 8600-8650 mess. It used custom designed modules around special wafer stuff coming from Gene Amdahl's kid's company Trilogy (which folded).

The MOS and CMOS processes came out with MicroVax processors which blew the 9000's doors off. Hate to say it but the small computer guys won on this -- small cheap chips in bulk over big large ECL monsters.

The 9000 was a pig -- IIRC it began with a water cooled version. Aquarius and Aridus (the air-cooled version). I heard rumors KO said DEC wasn't going to have any plumbers in Field Service (a probable reaction to water-cooled IBM).

Development and engineering worked for years to get it to work and the Vax 87xx and 85xx and 6xx boxes all grew to clustered and SMP stuff and had the throughput needed. The 9000 was an IBM type's wet dream of a VAX 11-370 8-).

Sounds interesting... I'd have loved to see the software. FreeBSD's still working with things like GEOM in 5.x to handle the disk geometry issues.

Interesting that a not-too-good technology like SUN's NFS became a standard. SYSV Unix had RFS which even supported remote access to tape devices via the ethernet... Damned shame it never caught on because it was Unix specific and NFS could even be dropped on MS-DOS, VAX-VMS, hell probably Perkin-Elmer Concurrent OS-32...

There's an advantage for an open-standard spec for software MULTIVENDOR BUY IN.

DEC should've done more with LAT and their DSA disk architecture -- but they needed to keep that high price structure-low volume ship overhead under control.

They did great manufacturing and design -- but they grew too fast without enough planning. Ken Olson was also surrounded at the top with too many second rate talents (Bell was NOT one of these).

If you read "DEC Is Dead, Long Live DEC: The Lasting Legacy of Digital Equipment Corporation",Edgar H. Schein (Editor), et al, ISBN: 1576752259 you'll see that a number of people who raised issued at DEC got frustrated with the problems and left to go elsewhere. DEC had far too much managment for the number of engineers and Ken Olson got too personally committed to certain projects -- and end some good ones out of bias and left some rotten decisions to rot and go to the gangrene that finally end the company.

Dec's decision not to OEM MicroVaxes and Palmer's on the Fab and Alpha and KO's on microcomputers.... all problems that helped kill them. DEC had the best 32 bit CPU chips and boards -- but never looked to outside equipment vendors building them into their appliances, alarms, tools, etc.

The MicroVax should have been the next PDP8 and PDP11... but they tried to handle it like it was a PDP10... or 11-780. Only direct sales. Not to be embedded... only board level products.

Short sighted as hell. Motorola's 68000 (and more the 68020-030) cleaned DEC's clock with a PDP11-Vaxish processor that became the Real Time Unix).

If Bell wanted hardware only and was successful those could've been running on VAX chips. They could've had a VAX vs. Motorola and Intel chip war and the best software available then was on the VAX.

Wonder if Microsoft would have anything beyond Basic on VAX chip Unix today if it happened. Perhaps they'd still be selling Xenix and AT&T would still be using VAX chips on their stuff instead of developing the 3b20 and 3b15 and 3b2 300-400-600-1000?

I wish DEC.. er Compaq... er HP would open up the Corporate Archives and let a historian document what happened there from 80-95...

The truth is in there if they haven't dumped the memos. There's a lot of stuff that happened or almost happened inluding the AT&T buyout Merger with DEC my wife heard about at Bell Labs and the AT&T outsource of System Admin-Management-Operations to DEC in 84.

Something big was up that would've changed all of the industry -- but I sound like I'm something from Area 51 when I mention it.

(It's almost like the thousand theories behind the Kennedy buttasination in 63.)

Did some of the things that went on in DEC in the mid 80's happen because it was quietly on the block? Did some decisions get made out of anger, spite and such.

Ken Olson never spoke publically about what happened to DEC in the late 70's...and 80's that led to the problems by the mid 80's.

I was there in '81-86 and I was told by VP types that there was return on investment and employee problems and that Sun and HP were whacking us pretty hard in the revenue per head area.

I felt they hired too many managers in the fat VAX sales days of the early 80's... especially ones from the Business Commercial (read IBM, GE, Honeywell) side and they were trying to lose the Scientific and Education markets that were a big cash generators in return for Banking and Wall Street computer users.

I felt they new they would lose AT&T and telecom by 85 or so. Perhaps due to some hard feelings. AT&T poached on DEC's turf picking up large numbers of DEC Field Service guys for in-house maintenance groups -- and dropped Vax service contracts and eventually (late 80's) phased out VAX systems for 3B's and Amdahl... and later Sun-HP.

Bill -- +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+ Bill Gates is a Persian cat and a monocle away from being a villain in a James Bond movie -- Dennis Miller +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+