What ever happened to Tandem and NonStop OS 2035

Kelli Halliburton

Some of the later -8's (VT78 anyone?) were very much personal microcomputers. The VT78 used the single-chip PDP-8 compatible microprocessor. It was packaged as a VT52 video terminal with two floppy drives and mostly sold as a word processing system. But all the good OS-8 software would run on it: RUNOFF, FORTRAN, I think there was an EMACS-8 ? It would have been a very good personal computer, even if the architecture was a bit odd.

But DEC had this problem that they had too many competing personal computers and did not push any of them much:

- VT78 described above - VT180 (Robin), a VT100 with an 8080 running CP-M - GIGI (sort of like the Radio Shack ColorComputer done DEC's way) - RAINBOW - a PC running MS-DOS but not compatible enough to actually run most shrink-wrapped PC software - and lets not forget the Heathkit LSI-11s

Of these the Rainbow got the most attention from DEC marketing. It was a loser because it did not do anything interesting that the IBM PC did not do, so it had value only by being cheaper than an IBM PC, and it was not a good enough PC to be usable by companies that were standardizing on PCs.

The Robin was cheaper, and could probably have competed on price if DEC had been willing to "cheapen it" by letting it into the retail channel and make use of the mbutt manufacturing muscle of the VT100 factory.

The GIGI was cute as a button but useless.

Lars Poulsen