> On Jul 6, 2017, at 5:53 PM, Alan Frisbie <flash...@flying-disk.com> wrote:
>
> On 07/06/2017 02:01 PM, Paul Koning wrote:
>>
>>> On Jul 6, 2017, at 4:20 PM, Alan Frisbie wrote:
>>>
>>> ...
>>> TRAX was designed around a modified version of RSX-11M-Plus,
>>> v1.0, yet no mention of it survives today. Indeed, a year after
>>> its announcement, it appeared to have sunk without a trace.
>>
>> I don't remember the exact timing, but my recollection is that
> > TRAX was cancelled within a few weeks of when it first shipped.
>
> That's pretty fast to kill a product! Do you have any idea what
> the reason was? (Both the real reason and what was announced?)
No to both. I only remember TRAX at all because I saw some of the manuals
sitting around, nice binders with a picture of a fast train on the cover. And
I remember the special terminals built for TRAX (VT62). But that was in the
DEC office in Merrimack (MKO) which wasn't where TRAX or RSX development was
done, so I wasn't close enough to where the action was to get more details.
> It seems to me that a product would have been a good match for
> the VAX, which was announced about the same time. I wonder why
> that never happened?
VAX/TRAX, neat. It may be that initially VMS wasn't all that efficient or
responsive. There were over the years a number of cases where VAXen were
pushed by management into roles that customers didn't believe they were ready
for. Timesharing, for example -- DEC tried to kill RSTS several times, but it
lived on much longer than they wanted. (IAS was the first "RSTS killer", hah.)
And I still have an "RT32" button, part of an effort among some engineers to
create a fast thin real-time OS for VAX, in the spirit of RT11. Nothing came
of that, though, apart from some unauthorized buttons.
paul
