Where should the type information be: in tags and descriptors 450

systems

Sigh! I'm not trying to declare that this was the way all of DEC's biz went. I am claiming that most of it went this way. Since you're talking about -20 and 11-70 installations, your timeframe is later than the one I'm talking about...about 5 years later.

And don't ever underestimate the documentation DEC shipped with their gear. We didn't know it at the time but we were good, and probably the best in the biz, about documenting everything tersely.

Since it was supposed to replace the -10s, it should have been a top priority to do that, if not The top priority.

There's no question about this. The -20 did not deliver this user thruput.

I'm not comparing them with each other. I'm comparing TOPS-10's ability to deliver user thruput with those OSes. The fact that all internal politics dismissed the notion of increasing user thruput was a big nail in DEC's coffin.

Nope. Corporate wanted to go back to being purely a hardware provider, not a software provider. Corporate tried desparately to ignore the importance of software. Going back to being a hardware company would have been fine; we certainly needed somebody to set a business policy so we could plan and work towards it.

However, Bell signed all those lovely VMS development requistions and reversed himself..yet again.

This is nuts. DEC destroyed their timesharing. They were into the VMS groups. Then Palmer got the edict to strip the company to the piece that Compaq wanted to buy.

We couldn't continue all existing product lines with the infrastructure we had. The infrastructure was designed to be hardware, not software. Our managers had to decide how the biz was supposed to go, and then tell us without a reversal of the decision just because some butthole had gas one day.

Ditto. :-) But I sure as hell would have liked to have tried.

I did.

That was the approach taken in the Mid-west. It all got started with one PDP-10 installation.

BAH

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