Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!ll-xn!ames!amdcad!rpw3 From: rpw3@amdcad.AMD.COM (Rob Warnock) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: brash micros versus the Big Iron: not yet Message-ID: <18203@amdcad.AMD.COM> Date: Wed, 9-Sep-87 03:20:02 EDT Article-I.D.: amdcad.18203 Posted: Wed Sep 9 03:20:02 1987 Date-Received: Thu, 10-Sep-87 06:59:30 EDT References: <622@winchester.UUCP> <299@ma.diab.UUCP> <8542@utzoo.UUCP> <301@ma.diab.UUCP> Reply-To: rpw3@amdcad.UUCP (Rob Warnock) Organization: [Consultant] San Mateo, CA Lines: 50 (*Sigh*) I can't let this one go by... In article <301@ma.diab.UUCP> pf@ma.UUCP (Per Fogelstrom) writes: +--------------- | In article <8542@utzoo.UUCP> henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) writes: | >Actually, this is not "easier access" but "easy access at a lower price". | >The micro people have rediscovered what some of us had with minicomputers | >15 years ago... | May i make myself a litle bit more clear ?? | 1. Software of today is much more "user friendly" and aimed for people | with very litle experience from computers. Compare what we had for | the PDP8 and NOVA computers for example. My mother who knows nothing | about computers can handle a PC. But i wouldn't dare to think of | what should happen if i let her lose on a PDP8. :-) +--------------- Hurumph! OS-8 doesn't compare so badly against MS/DOS, thank you! Virtually identical user interface to a (subset of a) PDP-10 running TOPS-10. In the late 1970's at Dig. Comm. Assoc. we had secretaries who switched back and forth from PDP-8/OS-8 systems to PDP-11/RT-11 to PDP-10/TOPS-10 and never got lost. (They used TECO to edit and RUNOFF to do text processing on all three machines.) Remember that TOPS-10/RT-11/OS-8 were the indirect intellectual parents of CP/M and MS/DOS. On a PDP-8 (8k words) you could compile/link/execute FORTRAN and DIBOL (ugh!) and assembler, run (interpretively) BASIC & FOCAL, and on a 12k machine you could get batch processing, and on a 16k machine do it all while you were doing real-time data collection! (A "k" of PDP-8 words ~= 1.5kbytes.) Hey, and let's not forget user-written loadable device drivers (*ALL* device drivers except the root disk were "loadable" ;-} ). It wasn't all that great by Unix standards, primarily due to no "fork()" in the O/S, but it was not all that much worse than the so-called "user friendly" PC. Yes, there was no "Lotus 1-2-3", but I'm not sure how "friendly" that is anyway, once you get past the playing-around stage. A bare PDP-8/a with 16k (of non-DEC RAM) cost around $2000 in quantity circa 1978. You could put together an "o.k." WP system for about $4K, or buy DEC's "WPS-8" for $5K or so. Not too bad... <> Rob Warnock Systems Architecture Consultant UUCP: {amdcad,fortune,sun,attmail}!redwood!rpw3 ATTmail: !rpw3 DDD: (415)572-2607 USPS: 627 26th Ave, San Mateo, CA 94403