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From: dag@chinet.UUCP (Daniel A. Glasser)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.dec.micro
Subject: Re: Another voice for the PRO.
Message-ID: <1844@chinet.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 17-Nov-87 00:01:17 EST
Article-I.D.: chinet.1844
Posted: Tue Nov 17 00:01:17 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 21-Nov-87 19:50:01 EST
References: <8711140131.AA10137@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Reply-To: dag@chinet.UUCP (Daniel A. Glasser)
Organization: Chinet - Public Access Unix
Lines: 57
Keywords: PRO Demise FLAME
Summary: A guess as to why DEC "axed" the PRO

Well, I may be able to shed a little light onto the fate of the
late, lamented, PRO-300 family.

I was working for DEC, and was involved at one level or another in
the development of the PRO from very early on until P/OS V2.0 (or was
it 3.0?)...  I wrote graphics firmware for a few P/OS versions, and
attended more meetings than I can recount.

The problem with the PRO was that it never found its market.  This
machine was driven by MARKETING (insert flame here).  These people
made decisions which most of the engineers working on the product
agreed would alienate the loyal PDP-11 following, ignore the base
of software already available on for the PDP, and be generally hostile
to the traditional DEC user.  They wanted to go after the "Power Users".
People who don't want to know anything, they just want it done.
They chose to go with a modified version of RSX-11M Plus with no MCR,
or even DCL, take away multi-user protection, drop a lot of CLI support,
etc., and make the machine act like an applications engine.

The RT-11 group developed for the PRO against the wishes of some of the
managers responsible.  The man in charge of software for the PRO at one
time said that Unix would be available for the PRO only "over my dead
body".

The hardware engineers designed a reliable workhorse in a packaging that
I've yet to see the equal of, and the product managers insisted that the
floppy drive controller have its formatting logic removed so that cheap
floppys could not be used (since they would have a high failure rate
and some brands would screw up the RX-50 heads) because none were
available certified for the high density (now being used by IBM AT's)
and if the floppy format failed, the user might blame DEC!

They then made application development too expensive and complicated
for small organizations (The native toolkit helped, but not enough).

No applications, no sales.

No sales, no further development to extend the family.

No further developments, no applications.

Repeat application until out of business...

RT-11 came too late to get the PRO into the lab.
Unix came too late to get the PRO into the schools.
Applications, if they came, were too late to get the PRO into the offices.

Too bad.  A machine with so much going for it was killed by bad marketing.
If the engineers had had their way, it may have been different.
-- 
					Daniel A. Glasser
----------------------------------------+----------------------------
Cheese is not a discipline!		| ...!ihnp4!chinet!dag
					| ...!ihnp4!mwc!gorgon!dag
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Disclaimer: I assume full responsibility for my opinions.
            If my employer knew of some of them, I'd be unemployed.