27 Nov
2022
27 Nov
'22
9:29 p.m.
Many schools were similarly gifted; I had them both at Georgia Tech and
at Emory. They didn't see a lot of real use. The one more-or-less cool
thing they had was a soft power switch; pushing it started an orderly Unix
shutdown (usually). Once in a while one had to yank the cord from the
wall to shut it down.
Arnold
"John P. Linderman" <jpl.jpl(a)gmail.com> wrote:
We were "gifted" a 3B2, as in "take
this and use it!". I ran a "ps" command
in single user mode, and it took 20 seconds to run.
Our machine names were themed around bird names, so we christened the 3B2
"junco". Our director said we had to get along,
so we renamed it "jay". But everyone knew what the J stood for. The 3B2
served as a doorstop.
On Sat, Nov 26, 2022 at 11:44 PM Phil Budne <phil(a)ultimate.com> wrote:
> Larry McVoy wrote:
> > I read the Wikipedia page on the 9000. It's sad that the 9000
> > wasn't cancelled when they had better alternatives.
>
> In an oral history Bob Supnik described Ken Olsen couldn't get his
> head around the fact that the NVAX chip could equal the 9000:
>
> @2:59:45 in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3tcCBHRIfU
>
> In part 2, Bob described how then DEC VP Gordon Bell having earlier
> predicted when the microprocessor performance curve would cross over
> minis and mainframes:
>
> @1:51:45 in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3tcCBHRIfU
>
> He also talks about how the company couldn't command the bsame gross
> margins as it did in the VAX era.
>