Thread: Word of the Day

Offtopic, but lately I've been liking the word..."ambivalence".

I have a certain ambivalence to many of the hardware platforms discussed on the boards here, but I do have a soft spot for the older DEC machines, PDP-8, PDP-11 and the best of all, the mighty VAX under the sublimely usable VMS operating system...

Originally Posted by adrianxw

I have a certain ambivalence to many of the hardware platforms discussed on the boards here, but I do have a soft spot for the older DEC machines, PDP-8, PDP-11 and the best of all, the mighty VAX under the sublimely usable VMS operating system...

Are you saying you don't like sony???

>>> Are you saying you don't like sony???

I said I liked the older DEC machines. In the small to medium sized machine market, DEC was an early innovator, but like most successful firms got bogged down in the detail as they grew.

The VAX architecture was a bold leap forward at the time. The Alpha processor an even greater one. Today, Intel and AMD are offering 64 bit chips, but the Alpha was there way before them, and when most top notch PC's were running with 100MHz 32 bit CPU's the 21064 was running a full 64 bit architecture with speeds up to 1GHz "by the end of the year".

When Compaq bought out DEC, one of the first things they did was kill the Alpha chips - a crime of galactic proportion. They couldn't kill them entirely because the customer demand was there, I was still buying Alpha systems 3 years ago, and have no doubt my old company still are, but they are not marketted, so are effectively dead.

Similaly, the real 32 bit Windows systems, (NT), were developed from a cut down version of VMS - indeed, DEC marketted NT for a while, and even MS admit to having DEC compatible versions of Windows. Properly done, Windows could now be up to VMS's level of stability, reliability and usability.

Does it not strike people as odd that companies like my last one, vastly huge in the global satellite communications business are still developing their mission critical software for platforms most people have never heard of under operating systems even less have...

The PC market may get there one day.

Originally Posted by adrianxw

>>> Are you saying you don't like sony???

I said I liked the older DEC machines. In the small to medium sized machine market, DEC was an early innovator, but like most successful firms got bogged down in the detail as they grew.

The VAX architecture was a bold leap forward at the time. The Alpha processor an even greater one. Today, Intel and AMD are offering 64 bit chips, but the Alpha was there way before them, and when most top notch PC's were running with 100MHz 32 bit CPU's the 21064 was running a full 64 bit architecture with speeds up to 1GHz "by the end of the year".

When Compaq bought out DEC, one of the first things they did was kill the Alpha chips - a crime of galactic proportion. They couldn't kill them entirely because the customer demand was there, I was still buying Alpha systems 3 years ago, and have no doubt my old company still are, but they are not marketted, so are effectively dead.

Similaly, the real 32 bit Windows systems, (NT), were developed from a cut down version of VMS - indeed, DEC marketted NT for a while, and even MS admit to having DEC compatible versions of Windows. Properly done, Windows could now be up to VMS's level of stability, reliability and usability.

Does it not strike people as odd that companies like my last one, vastly huge in the global satellite communications business are still developing their mission critical software for platforms most people have never heard of under operating systems even less have...

The PC market may get there one day.

I had read about the PDP-[8/11], I had heard of DEC, mostly along with tandy (my sisters friend used to own one...).

I think that the PC market has already bloomed in that direction, mostly due to the success of Microsoft. For example, I had bought a graphics card (ATI Radeon 9600), for its dual monitor capability, but finding a driver for it was impossible, which didn't surprise me, it had many non-standard features that most don't need or use, like a t.v. tuner, this card was made specifically FOR microsoft, blocking out users who may want to stray from the norm.

While some companys are straying from the norm a bit more, most are doing so passively, like NVidia, which releases software for other Operating Systems (NOT Windows), but still do so holding on to the "technology" more suited to some non-standard Operating Systems.

Maybe theres hope for the computing world yet...