I was visiting Holmdel in 1981, and there was a tradeshow for the BellMAC CPUs there, filling ground floor of the central atrium. There was some swag, which I had for a few years, including refrigerator magnets. The one I remember:

"Don't be alone, call MACphone!"

I remember reading an article in the early 80s pointing out that, due to the scale of the Bell System, the center of the universe of semiconductor fabrication at that time was ... Allentown, PA. Western Electric had an ad, along the lines of, "who will create the 256 Kb memory part? WE will" -- WE as in Western Electric.Those parts would have been fabbed in Allentown IIRC.

It is a bit hard to recall, much less believe. but PA, land of dead still mills, the Molly Maguires, and underground coal mine fires that will burn for centuries, also had silicon.

On Mon, Nov 28, 2022 at 1:01 PM Kenneth Goodwin <kennethgoodwin56@gmail.com> wrote:

That must be the 300 B superhive model CPU

On Mon, Nov 28, 2022, 1:54 PM William Corcoran <wlc@jctaylor.com> wrote:

I have a 3b2/300. Anytime you run a command that is compute bound, like factoring a large prime number, the CPU buzzes!

Bill Corcoran

On Nov 27, 2022, at 9:52 AM, John P. Linderman <jpl.jpl@gmail.com> wrote:

[EXTERNAL]

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@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.

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