Dave Engvall wrote: > It is amazing how many DEC users, etc come crawling out of the woodwork. > All of them with great stories about how things used to be. >
Love DEC stories. As field service technician I learned how to repair PDP-8 mostly by fire, i.e. in the field. Had some training for PDP-11 systems from a coworker but never at DEC in the US. Commies did not trust me to come back from training as I never wanted to join their party. Still, I was good at computer HW support. Tektronix 465 (best scope ever), a set of spare boards if I was lucky, a box of spare TTL chips, and Jensen toolbox with Fluke DMM, wrench and screw driver sets, hammer, wire wrap tool, soldering iron, was all I needed to visit interesting places, steel mills, hospitals, engine making plants, power plants and distribution stations, etc. Some of them were running real time applications. Those were good old days in some way. > With all this architectural experience there ought to be some > strongly held opinions on a processor chip that would do a > good job on real-time applications such as emc and still be How about 2 GHz dual core DEC Alpha :-) > affordable. I really believe that someplace along the path Intel > is going to make the Px unusable for real time. We as a group are > going to need to be able to migrate to some other chip-set. > > Yes, I know I've been smoking the wrong stuff ... or maybe the right > stuff. > Nothing would please me more than having a small PDP system under my desk and run Linux on it. While running Linux on PC is OK, it's still suffering from poor (bad really) architecture. With exception of more speed and memory, PCs have not advanced much from the original architecture. Interrupts were always a problem, not understanding that boot device should be anything that can deliver bits (paper and magnetic tape, disks, etc.) That was never an issue with PDP. Well, all is not lost. VAX architecture is not dead yet. http://www.winvms.com/nuvax.htm There is enough critical applications out there that are worth supporting and some people are doing just that. They should do something about their front panels on NuPDP though. No modern PC with water cooling, tons of LEDs, or shiny fans look as good as PDP-8 or PDP-11/44 front panels. You could tell what system was doing just by looking at LEDs. > Ideas?? > Turn the clock back so we can change the history. Oh, wait, commies would all of a sudden come back, never mind. > Dave Have fun, -- Rafael ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
