Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!dg!lewine From: lewine@dg.dg.com (Don Lewine ) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: Yet Another Upgrade Anecdote Message-ID: <424@dg.dg.com> Date: 3 May 90 13:59:42 GMT References: <43777@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu> <1161.263f4987@gp.govt.nz> Reply-To: uunet!dg!lewine (Don Lewine ) Organization: Data General, Westboro, MA. Lines: 25 In article bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein) writes: > > >Now, how about the story about a certain well known defense contractor >back in the hey-days of the Microvax-II (about .9MIPS, or 1MVUP :-) >with their own silicon implementation that ran at 7 MIPS. But DEC >refusing to buy back the design (supposedly) because it was too >difficult (costly) to verify that their implementation really worked. This is another story based on only a small bit of truth. It seems that the govenment had some well tested FORTRAN code for tracking things with radar. The thing ran on a VAX and they needed to run it faster to track more targets at a given instant. The solution was to build a special purpose VAX-like machine to run this program. They left out a few details, like memory management. The machine was fast and it did run the program without modification. DEC did issue a license for this project and collected a very modest royalty. The machine was never considered for any non-military use. BTW, DEC has a very good set of tools that will verify that a given machine is a VAX. It would not have been hard to test this machine, even in 1983. -- Don Lewine