4 ms·

> If it had instead spent that vast R&D budget on PRISM and MICA, it would have had what became NT to itself. It’s not clear to me whether they would have gott

> If it had instead spent that vast R&D budget on PRISM and MICA, it would have had what became NT to itself. It’s not clear to me whether they would have gotten as much out of it as Microsoft did out of NT, though. The marketing of NT4 (at least) reached down to fairly small server setups (even if wasn’t particularly popular on the workstation side—hardware requirements?), what with the BackOffice branding and everything, and Microsoft wouldn’t have blown you off if you just wanted to give them $5k for a few licenses. As I’m reading it, DEC’s mindset couldn’t really support this kind of strategy. Also, nearly nobody programs against the NT API as opposed to the Win32 API and things built on top of it. I can’t tell what the intention of MICA was—keep the nice native API essentially private and only expose the VMS “personality” running on top of it, like Microsoft did, or something else?

lproven 3y ago
> It’s not clear to me whether they would have gotten as much out of it as Microsoft did out of NT, though. Oh, absolutely agreed. MS did very well and the core of NT is a superb product. But merely having a superb product is not enough. It's hard to see how big and how influential DEC was today. Now, young techies assume that an 8-bit byte is a universal thing, that it's natural and obvious that computers just obviously use binary and that means word lengths that are powers of 2... Whereas DEC sold vastly successful minicomputers with word lengths of 12, 18, 24 and 36 bits as well as 8-bit and 16-bit machines! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmed_Data_Processor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmed_Data_Processor And those machines inspired the designs and the command lines of CP/M and MS-DOS, and as such, directly and profoundly influenced the PC industry. These were not niche machines, they were the mainstream that led to the standard OS that made Intel a success with the 8080, and that in turn led to the Zilog Z80 that spawned many multi-million-selling 1980s home computers... but it also led to the PC. DEC OS/8 (and its big sibling TOPS-10) are what led to not only the CP/M and DOS command lines, but also things like 3-letter file extensions (after a dot). Every .TXT and .JPG and .HTM file exists because of the PDP-8. https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/81341.html https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/81341.html And that was a 12-bit machine, not 8-bit, or 16-bit like the PDP-11, the machine that led to the 32-bit VAX, whose VMS is the direct ancestor of MICA and NT. UNIX was developed for the PDP-7, an 18-bit machine. The machines and their OSes are nearly forgotten now, and DEC is a footnote, but the weird thing is that both the CP/M–MS-DOS–OS/2–Windows–Windows NT family evolved from DEC OSes on DEC machines, but also the Unix family was designed and implemented by a 3rd party on DEC hardware, and then ported to different DEC hardware. The two big rival lines of OSes today both can be traced back to the same company's products. Unix and microcomputers are what killed DEC... It foolishly bet against them, it bet on big iron and tried to turn its most successful minicomputer into a mainframe. But even despite that, and wasting a mind-blowing amount of money, it still came back and produced the first 64-bit RISC chip, and the first 64-bit Unix to run on it, and it got a native version of the industry-dominating OS which grew out of its own cancelled project. And that chip was also the target of the first ever port of Linux to something non-x86. It was an incredible comeback. It's tragic that ultimately it wasn't enough.

lproven 3y ago

> It’s not clear to me whether they would have gotten as much out of it as Microsoft did out of NT, though. Oh, absolutely agreed. MS did very well and the core of NT is a superb product. But merely having a superb product is not enough. It's hard to see how big and how influential DEC was today. Now, young techies assume that an 8-bit byte is a universal thing, that it's natural and obvious that computers just obviously use binary and that means word lengths that are powers of 2... Whereas DEC sold vastly successful minicomputers with word lengths of 12, 18, 24 and 36 bits as well as 8-bit and 16-bit machines! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmed_Data_Processor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmed_Data_Processor And those machines inspired the designs and the command lines of CP/M and MS-DOS, and as such, directly and profoundly influenced the PC industry. These were not niche machines, they were the mainstream that led to the standard OS that made Intel a success with the 8080, and that in turn led to the Zilog Z80 that spawned many multi-million-selling 1980s home computers... but it also led to the PC. DEC OS/8 (and its big sibling TOPS-10) are what led to not only the CP/M and DOS command lines, but also things like 3-letter file extensions (after a dot). Every .TXT and .JPG and .HTM file exists because of the PDP-8. https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/81341.html https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/81341.html And that was a 12-bit machine, not 8-bit, or 16-bit like the PDP-11, the machine that led to the 32-bit VAX, whose VMS is the direct ancestor of MICA and NT. UNIX was developed for the PDP-7, an 18-bit machine. The machines and their OSes are nearly forgotten now, and DEC is a footnote, but the weird thing is that both the CP/M–MS-DOS–OS/2–Windows–Windows NT family evolved from DEC OSes on DEC machines, but also the Unix family was designed and implemented by a 3rd party on DEC hardware, and then ported to different DEC hardware. The two big rival lines of OSes today both can be traced back to the same company's products. Unix and microcomputers are what killed DEC... It foolishly bet against them, it bet on big iron and tried to turn its most successful minicomputer into a mainframe. But even despite that, and wasting a mind-blowing amount of money, it still came back and produced the first 64-bit RISC chip, and the first 64-bit Unix to run on it, and it got a native version of the industry-dominating OS which grew out of its own cancelled project. And that chip was also the target of the first ever port of Linux to something non-x86. It was an incredible comeback. It's tragic that ultimately it wasn't enough.