Where should the type information be: in tags and descriptors 445

Yep.

a happen and

I don't see why we would undercut our profit makers. Note that I don't understand much about this stuff.

But DEC (logically) went from providing timesharing to single-task (which is worse than single-user) when they decided to bet all their eggs on VMS.

Nope. Not at all. Just because the idiots gave lip-service and called their minis big systems did not make them deliver big system computing services.

There was, and is, always a niche for mainframe computing. There was a different niche for super-minis. Giving access to all of that variable computing services had to be provided by thingies now called desktops.

TOPS-10 had installations that would receive computing requests from thousands of user who prep'ed and submitted their batch jobs on logical desktops. In those days, it was a terminal in a user's office that was connected to a "mini" which would then invisbly send the batch to a PDP-10 which would do all of the processing, and send the results back to the mini. The mini would notify the user that her-his job was complete.

Providing a desktop environment would have eliminated the middle computer which was highly attractive to bean counters and sysadmins.

A TOPS-10, ANF-10 type took a look at the Rainbow and the Pro-300 when they came out. Both had a gazillion bells and whistles that was not needed and could have been stripped to a beautiful working machine that college kiddies would have been able to buy. We should have sold them like we sold TTYs with the added feature that the TTY did not have to be connected to do local mode work.

For more information about DEC diminishing user thruput, read my fight with Crispin in the PDP10 newsgroup last month.

BAH

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