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From: gingell@opus.Eng.Sun.COM (Rob Gingell)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.arch
Subject: Re: XDS940 computer (or Xerox Sigma 9)
Message-ID: <14983@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM>
Date: 12 Jun 91 15:09:39 GMT
References: <1991Jun5.231450.25856@digi.lonestar.org> <13933@goofy.Apple.COM> <1991Jun8.085847.7980@m.cs.uiuc.edu>
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In article <1991Jun8.085847.7980@m.cs.uiuc.edu> gillies@m.cs.uiuc.edu (Don Gillies) writes:
>The XDS was not *that* great a machine.  When Xerox PARC was starting
>up, they asked the Xerox bigwigs to buy them a DEC-10.  Corporate
>Xerox balked at the idea, and offered them an XDS machine.  The PARC
>researchers told them "no thank you, we don't need it after all."
>They went back to the lab and built a DEC-10 from scratch using TTL
>parts available at the time.  This was the genesis of CPU development
>at Xerox.
>
>Legend has it the mutant PDP-10 was faster than DEC's best model.

I also seem to recall that it was certainly faster than the PDP-10's
at the time, but don't remember whether it exceeded the speeds of the
last PDP-10's or not.

>Trivia Question:  What was this DEC-10 named?

MAXC.  

If I remember correctly, MAXC was this heavily microcoded machine
that was a PDP-10 most of the time, but could be other things too.
It was actually set up to be a PDP-10 with a BBN paging box, and ran
TENEX -- perhaps the last site outside of BBN (and maybe SRI) to do so.