On 02/11/2016 10:56 AM, Jerome H. Fine wrote:
>Jon Elson wrote:
>On 02/11/2016 08:56 AM, Mark Wickens wrote:
It's good to hear that the VAX was a cost-effective
solution - there are
too many stories about how expensive DEC gear was, but I
imagine they
primarily came after PCs started dropping in price.
We paid somewhere between 200 and 250K for our first
11/780. We had an RM05 and a TU77, and 256 KB of
memory. It was a pretty basic system, but ran rings
around the campus 360/65 system. We also had a pair of
370/145's that were an expensive joke. (The 360/65 ran
rings around BOTH of them. They ran time sharing on
them, limited to 4 users/machine. We often had 8+ users
plus batch jobs running on our 780.)
Any idea about the date of when VMS could do that with a VAX?
Well, the first VAX VMS should have been quite capable of
doing good timesharing. We may have had VMS 3.0 or 3.1 and
then a number of updates. I did not keep real good records,
but I think we got the machine about 1980. There was an
earlier 11/780 at our Med School that also had a bunch of
terminals on it. I'm pretty sure they had more disks and
memory on it than ours. They got theirs in 1979, I think.
The VAX was first announced in late 1977.
I don't remember how expensive a Cyber 3300 was back in
1967, but I
worked at Northern Electric in Ottawa at the time.
OK, well, now that was a whole DECADE before the VAX. The
3300 was a discrete transistor machine, more than a full
generation earlier than the VAX.
The reason for this reply is to document that there were
already such
systems available with very innovative software solutions
as far back
as the 1970s.
Certainly, DEC had the PDP-10 and other companies had quite
good timesharing systems. I'm certainly not implying that
nobody did timesharing before the VAX. What I was
contrasting is how expensive IBM 360's were, and how poorly
they did at timesharing, than our VAX system.
Jon
