Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!att!linac!pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!think.com!paperboy!meissner From: meissner@osf.org (Michael Meissner) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: PR1ME 32I mode (was Re: Porting OSes (was DEC RISC Architecture)) Message-ID: Date: 31 Oct 90 16:02:21 GMT References: <4462@trantor.harris-atd.com> <107038@convex.convex.com> <3970@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au> Sender: troot@OSF.ORG Organization: Open Software Foundation Lines: 37 In-reply-to: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk's message of 16 Oct 90 15:20:23 GMT In article pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi) writes: | For this and other reasons (the usual ones: while their marketing was | overjoyed at the idea of being able to compete with DEC, over which | their hardware had a price/performance advantage, also in the UNIX | market, but their technical people said "PRIMOS already has everything") | the deal never got of the ground. Now Pr1me has had to eat humble pie | (incidentally after Pr1me I offered the same deal to DG for the MV8000 | itself, and could not save them either :->). | | If they had been less myopic they could have established a significant | presence in the UNIX market. After providing the C compiler for the two DG UNIX'es on the MV (MV/UX which ran as AOS/VS programs with a UNIX system call emulator, and DG/UX which ran on the native hardware) plus the normal AOS/VS compiler, I strongly doubt that either PR*ME or DG could have established a significant presence in the UNIX market. This is because neither of the machines fit into the PDP-11/VAX mode of byte oriented machines. Too many C programmers seem to not have the discipline to properly pass correctly typed arguments (or sometimes even understand why different flavors of pointer might have different representations). It's interesting that when I started on the C compiler (~81 or 82), the person who had done the functional and product specs, had estimated that DG would sell only a handful of licenses, and a few machines. The entire UNIX market segment was estimated to be a few Universities, AT&T, and the Bell operating companies. The last time I checked (~87 or ~88), C had become the 3rd most popular DG MV/Eclipse 32-bit language (after Cobol and Fortran respectively). -- Michael Meissner email: meissner@osf.org phone: 617-621-8861 Open Software Foundation, 11 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA, 02142 Do apple growers tell their kids money doesn't grow on bushes?