Where should the type information be: in tags and descriptors 446

Good to hear from you.

What's happened with computers since 1983 is that there are fewer and fewer large central systems, and more and more work is done on the desktop. DEC made a lot of money of selling tens of thousands of $100k systems; to change to a model where you instead sell millions of $5k systems (very roughly, for the mid 1980s) is a big switch in design, manufacturing, and marketing. And, to pull it off, you have to commit to the low-price high-performance desktop systems; systems that do 1-10 of what the expensive central system does at 1-20 the price or less. With much lower margins per unit and a completely different sales process. Having made that commitment, you're undercutting the sales of your main current products; at that point, the switch in paradigm *has to* work, or you're dead. Established companies very rarely make that bet, and even more rarely win it. Thus they're often destroyed by tech changes. Kodak is in considerable danger of that now, though they're putting up a struggle (and at least they're used to consumer-level retail products).

I'm not sure what you mean "single-task". VMS was a fairly ordinary timesharing system, with some other capabilities. Not one of my favorite ones (and I supported it in the field for a while before coming to Marlboro).

A lot of the PDP-8 sales were for single-user systems in the scientific environment -- experiment control and such, some graphics. RT-11 was used that way too, and industrially. The company had kind of a weird profile. And I don't actually know where the money really came from in various years.

"Big" got redefined in the late 80s or early 90s to mean anything not a desktop system, and I was using that definition. The Vax was a big system, and it got end by the desktop systems.

Yes, there's a niche for mainframe computing, definitely. Generally, for single central systems for database and transaction-processing networks. For small to medium companies that's a super-mini in the old terms, probably a Sun server these days. For bigger companies, it's a full-blown mainframe.

DEC might have been able to keep the mainframe lines going, but they were looking fairly old at the time. And that's not the market where going head-to-head with IBM has ever been a big success.

Remote batch wasn't flying any more even when I was in college. People wanted to interact -- and people wanted to spend more cycles on the user interface, as less and less specialized people started needing to use computers.

Ooh, that should be interesting :-). --