Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!att!tsdiag!scr1!pechter
From: pechter@scr1.ocpt.ccur.com (Bill Pechter)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: IBM and Apple Operating Systems
Message-ID: <582@scr1.ocpt.ccur.com>
Date: 3 Nov 89 22:34:42 GMT
References: <843@dvnspc1.Dev.Unisys.COM> <110200024@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu>
Reply-To: pechter@scr1.UUCP (Bill Pechter)
Organization: CONCURRENT COMPUTER,OCEANPORT NJ
Lines: 42

In article <110200024@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> mcdonald@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu writes:
>
>
>>To say that Microsoft and IBM blew it, at least as far as 
>>the DOS PC, seems to be a bit of 20/20 hindsight.  They must have
>
>It wasn't IBM that blew it. It was DEC. They had the wherewithal
>about 1976 to take the whole market that has developed for small
>computers. With the PDP-11 - LSI-11 chipset. They could have marketed
>on a wide scale appropriate computers with this chip - and
>with 32kbyte or 48 kbyte or even 56 kbyte of memory and RT-11.

Doug -- you've got that one right.  Hell, my 64kb PDT11/150 ran 5 jobs
in 64k of memory with 5 active tty lines doing i/o and a printer on 
the sixth serial port.

RTMON ran on one of the TTY's giving me a real time monitor of system 
utilization.  All on a desktop.   Ask the Heath users who ran H19's.

I'm getting an 11/23 soon...

Perhaps I can make it do what SCO Xenix on my AT&T6300 and MS-DOS can't...

DEC has never known how to make a true personal computer.  The closest thing
I found was RT11 v5.1 on my old PRO350.  POS (Pro Operating System) was a 
menu driven nightmare and Task Building (RSX11-m'ese for Linking a program)
was a nightmare under POS.

I think something like TSX+   ( a multi-user, multi-tasking version of RT )
is friendlier than Unix and the 11 architecture is easy to write for and easy
to hack hardware on.

(I wish DEC would've looked to their employees rather than to marketing -- 
when they tried to figure how to make a personal computer.)

Bill

-- 
Bill Pechter -- Home - 103 Governors Road, Lakewood, NJ 08701 (201)370-0709
Work -- Concurrent Computer Corp., 2 Crescent Pl, MS 172, Oceanport,NJ 07757 
Phone -- (201)870-4780    Usenet  . . .  rutgers!pedsga!tsdiag!scr1!pechter
  **   MS-DOS is CP/M on steroids, bigger, bulkier and not much better  **