What ever happened to Tandem and NonStop OS 2103
Let me get in a few data points here.
I was there as a developer and manager of transaction-based systems that communicated realtime to a user base in the tens of thousands, with live interactions to several thousand.
The core machines had no external users; all was done with comminications protocols. My contribution was to make these as resilient and stateless as possible; as well as to support a number of different clients.
I think you need a crowbar. The kid is not understanding this point. DEC didn't tell their customers how to use their gear after they bought it. It was their gear...
Around the core machines was a layer of machines running as communications servers.
PCs, as they were promoted by IBM for business, were a giant leap sideways. They proliferated because they played better games than test-only terminals. If you look closely...
DEC was originally in the loop; a set of PDP11-74s was on the shortlist for the "layer 2" machines, but when they moved the offer to a VAX 11-785 with VMS they were out on performance by almost an order of magnitude. This was thoroughly tested with prototype programs.
Prime took that order, with a number of 550-II's, later complemented with 2550's. ND and Wang also entered bids. This was decided in August 1982, and the systems were running by January 1983.
The core systems were later migrated to Tandem sulution, with lots of pc's connected to a transaction protocol network. The only real alternative was an IBM mainframe, but that would have led everyone in a direction that was not wanted. Part of IBM's tie-in. This went live March 14th 1987.
The Prime system was migrated to *n*x after I did a proof-of-concept (and correctness) implementation on QNX. This went live as a slow phase-in in 1991. SGI got that contract with their Challenge series of servers.
This application setup was right in the core of DEC's main market. Other, similar organizations used VMS. One tried, and abandoned it for *n*x based solutions because of performance problems.
In the period between the axing of the 11-74 and the maturing of the VAX 8600 (initial price was too high) DEC simply wasn't compebreastive at all. The events of May 17th 1983 also nixed all credibility regarding staying power of the systems.
Such events give large organizations heebie-jeebies, and are an important reason Open Source has the high-level backing it has.
ASCI-Q (the 8,192 processor Alpha system) is an HP SC-45. Most of the top computers on the www.top500.org list are built by the companies...
-- mrr
What ever happened to Tandem and NonStop OS 2104
Alt Folklore Computers from Newsgroups