[TUHS] Peter H. Salus comments on introduction of VAX

Admittedly the page is a rant from 1997 but it does have a few tidbits. Page is here: http://www.mids.org/pay/mn/704/bits.html Excerpt about VAX: << And it's over 20 years since Gordon Bell came up with his ideas for a DEC family with a 32-bit architecture. That was implemented by Bill Demmer, Larry Portner, and Bill Strecker as DEC's VAX line: Virtual Address Extension. Bell's notion allowed DEC to produce a line of computers that continues today, and certainly occupied a number of desktops over 15 years ago. When the VAX was ``pre-announced,'' the Unix architects at Bell Labs had become disillusioned with DEC, they didn't like VMS and they thought that the VAX had an ``offensively fat instruction set.'' Anyway, Steve Johnson and Dennis Ritchie were working on their Unix port to the Interdata. (Which Steve referred to as the ``Intersnail.'') So DEC approached Charlie Roberts at AT&T in Holmdel, NJ. Tom London, John Reiser and Ken Swanson were interested; they got a VAX in early 1978. In three months they ported Version 7 to the VAX. Roberts told me: ``We got the machine in January, they had it running in April, and by August it really worked.'' >> __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search http://shopping.yahoo.com