Was Ultrix for DECstations -- now DEC advances

[Bill Pechter]

Allison wrote:

>>Subject: Re: Ultrix for DECstations
>>  From: Bill Pechter <pechter at gmail.com>
>>  Date: Sun, 13 Nov 2005 14:09:13 -0500
>>    To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
>>
>>Allison wrote:
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>>>Who was it that had the signline of something like:  
>>>
>>>Don't you wish you could buy now what DEC had then.
>>>
>>>Allison
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>>>      
>>>
>>You remembered. 8-)
>>
>>d|i|g|i|t|a|l had it THEN.  Don't you wish you could still buy it now!
>>pechter-at-gmail.com
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Came up with that one night thinking about DEC's UDA-50, HSC50 and 
clustering.

DEC always had stuff that was easy for the end user.  Not always for the 
programmer (TKB taskbuilder comes to mind...)  TKB had more options than 
EMACS had special keystrokes.

I never did get along much with RSX as more than a user.  Coding under 
RT11 was great and RSTS/E Basic Plus was slick.

Multiuser Basic on RT11 was slick.  I had 4 terminals off a PDT11/150 
supplying different functions...  Program input on one, console on 
another, monitor of memory on a third, serial printer on another.  In 
60kb of memory.   There's a PDT11/150 selling on Ebay now.
I thought about it but the storage was too limiting.

Rumor has it some hacker at DEC took the signals off the bus and was 
working on a hard disk that would look like an RK or something like an RL.

Would've been nice.  Didn't need the memory management if I had faster 
disks to play with stuff like sysgen.

I see echos of DEC ideas everywhere.

Seems interesting that the SATA Drives are kind of similar to RA8x's, 
right down to the Red cable.  SATA, Serial SCSI... Fiber Channel attach 
drives... seems like '85 to me.

Only took 15 years for the industry to catch up.  I saw IBM's Sysplex as 
an attempt to do similar stuff.  Most new clusters can't come close to 
the single system image shared system disks DEC did in '85.

Upgrade one disk image and you get all the

With some SATA hot swap backplanes and some drive sleds -- it's not too 
bad a NAS device for a little bit of money...  But still not 
dual-attached and clustered.



Once you get into stuff like SAFE-T dual attach SCSI (IIRC the acronym) 
or the SATA version
you're talking money.


>Thankyou for that!  Some of the things I was used to at DEC I still haven't 
>found a PC version that is close.  If there ever was one that would be
>VAXNotes, really great collaboritive tool.
>
>Anyone ever do a wintel editor (NOT WORD) that had a single key for advance
>cursor one word?  
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Hell.  I want a Decmate box just for WPS...

I've got WPS-80... but I'd love gold-key word processing on Windows...

One time I tried getting SmallEDT up on CP/M 80...to give me EDT on CP/M.

After hacking it up to get the number of characters in identifier labels 
down to what my compiler would handle I got something bigger than the TPA.

Not being a C coder... I gave up for a while.  I'd like to try to do it 
again.


No mouse needed.  Quick Response.  I was once looking to map something 
like it out of WordStar or vi.

The wife was amazed how easy WPS was to learn for an untrained novice at 
the keyboard.
Wordstar was hell and WordPerfect required all the special keyboard 
overlays...


>Allison
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Bill