8 ms·

Long gone, DEC is still powering the world of computing

143 points by sohkamyung 3y ago

tapland 3y ago
Worked with OpenVMS for a few years. It was great fun and lots of stories from the older colleagues who used to work at 'digital'.
flyinghamster 3y ago
It probably would have made the article too long to discuss the earlier 12-, 18-, and 36-bit systems, as well as the 16-bit PDP-11 and its outsize influence on later systems. However, a key point also is lost: DEC's early dismissal of personal computers, only to have them catch up to and eat the entire minicomputer category. Their early micros were half-hearted; the Rainbow 100 ran MS-DOS but was not PC compatible, and even lacked a FORMAT command for formatting floppy disks (you were expected to only buy preformatted disks without hub rings because they damaged the RX50 drive mechanism). The Professional 300 series, based on PDP-11 architecture, was deliberately made not fully compatible to existing PDP-11 minicomputers (and also had that RX50 floppy drive). They were so worried about cannibalizing their own business that they forgot that they could get eaten by their new competitors instead.
- ghaff 3y ago
  >the Rainbow 100 ran MS-DOS but was not PC compatible Compatibility with computer systems from other manufacturers was such an alien concept to the minicomputer makers that they all pretty much genuinely thought they were doing a great job by being mostly MS/PC-DOS compatible. A common compatibility test was whether a system could run unmodified Microsoft Flight Simulator out of the box. Most couldn't.
  - panick21_ 3y ago
    It was a thing in computers and mainframes. Lots of IBM copies. But I think more importantly they literally released 3 different computer personal systems literally on the same day. That was totally ridiclous. Use your PDP11 stuff to compete head to head with PC or go PC compatable, half and half is bad. And then the also had CM/S at the same time. That a totally crazy and wasteful strategy. The Rainbow guy then went to Sun and build the i386, another non PC compatable that failed. But arguable that one was actually a good idea.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      Fair enough about plug-compatible mainframes. Though that probably was able to happen to at least some degree because IBM was acutely aware of anti-trust scrutiny.
      - panick21_ 3y ago
        I mean even before IBM was dominate, after IBM moved to 360. Honeywell copied some of the older mainframes and made lots of sales. Cloning has been a thing in computing for a while and there is no legal way to stop it in many cases. But I'm not an expert on that.
- retrac 3y ago
  Yes. The MicroVAX I and II were IC implementations of the original VAX. Vax on a chip. (Two different implementations. Low and high end.) They were designed and manufactured in-house by DEC, and were for sale in VAX minicomputer products by late 1984, early 1985 in volume. In 1984, the only full 32-bit microprocessor that was actually available for a workstation or personal computer was the Motorola 68020. The Intel 386 wouldn't be out until late 1985. > They were so worried about cannibalizing their own business that they forgot that they could get eaten by their new competitors instead. There is perhaps an alternate history, where DEC started making 32-bit workstations and high-end personal computers around then as a major push, and not in the late 1980s as an afterthought. Though by 1984, IBM was starting to feel the pressure from competition in the low-end PC market. DEC would have felt that pressure! They were selling PC compatibles already. Margins were razor-thin, sales were impersonal. Exact opposite of how DEC usually operated. No surprise management saw it as a risky sector to further expand in.
  - flyinghamster 3y ago
    Yup, I can see how they might not want to become a consumer product maker. Yet they could have parlayed the LSI-11 and successors into the position of Intel, IBM, and Microsoft combined, and flat-out owned a big chunk of personal computing, even if they stayed behind the scenes selling chipsets and software. Indeed it could be said that the PDP-1 was one of the world's first personal computers, but it was still a school/enterprise machine at a school/enterprise price.
- panick21_ 3y ago
  The PC is not why DEC failed really. And by 1992 they actually had a profitable PC buissness unit. Plenty of manufactures make mostly server stuff. That really the issue, they failed on continung to be dominate in bigger servers. And much of their revenue depended on support contracts. If you sell less systems and those systems are less depenpended on you Unix/NT then there is just gone be less revenue.
- sillywalk 3y ago
  They also invested $Billions in the VAX 9000, to try and get back at the high-end mainframe market, but it was delayed, and the NVAX chip was almost as fast, but in a desktop form-factor for a fraction of the price.
  - lproven 3y ago
    This. A vital detail that explains much else, which goes unmentioned in this terrible article. And MICA/PRISM. And Unix. And the PDP series. And the OS/2 connection. And so much more.
    - sillywalk 3y ago
      OS/2 connection? A cursory search didn't turn up anything.
      - lproven 3y ago
        Windows NT wasn't a new ground-up project. It's based on some OS/2 code and design. When IBM and MS fell out and divorced over the OS/2 project, there were 3 versions of OS/2 underway: • OS/2 1, 16-bit, for the 80286 • OS/2 2, 32-bit, for the 80386 • OS/2 3, 32-bit, CPU-independent and cross-platform. IBM kept v2, finished it, and released OS/2 2, 2.1, 3, 4 & 4.5. V3 and after were codenamed "Warp" but the company failed to negotiate with the owners of Star Trek for a marketing deal. MS kept OS/2 3, the planned CPU-independent version. Dave Cutler and his team at DEC were angry at DEC management because DEC cancelled the Mica cross-platform OS and PRISM RISC CPU to run it. Cutler was head-hunted by MS and given OS/2 3 to finish and make work. The project was originally developed on the Intel i860 RISC chip, codenamed N10. (8086, 286, 386, 486 = X86. 86 * 10 = 860 = i860.) So it was called OS/2 NT for N-Ten. While work was underway, Windows 3 became a huge hit. The company worked out a 32-bit version of the Windows API, called Win32, and renamed OS/2 NT to "Windows NT". Yes, there is a lot of VMS design in the NT design, but it's not direct inheritance: it's because Cutler was planning a CPU-independent VMS with "personalities" that could run binaries from other OSes, such as DOS and UNIX. And aside from that, there is also a fair chunk of OS/2. NT 3.x could use OS/2 HPFS disk volumes, run text-mode OS/2 binaries, and had an optional extra Presentation Manager add-on to run graphical OS/2 binaries.
ElectricalUnion 3y ago
I was expecting a mention of how DEC Video Terminal hardware terminal inline escape sequences are still very relevant as a de facto terminal standard.
- kps 3y ago
  Most of the ones in common use now are an actual terminal standard, ANSI X3.64 aka ISO 6429 aka ECMA-48¹. Most of the others in common use come from xterm extensions. ¹ https://www.ecma-international.org/wp-content/uploads/ECMA-48_5th_edition_june_1991.pdf https://www.ecma-international.org/wp-content/uploads/ECMA-4...
octotoad 3y ago
> Dan Dobberpuhl was one of the original Alpha designers before he left DEC to start a chip design firm called P.A. Semi, which Apple bought in 1998 for its talent to work on their Arm processors. P.A. Semi didn't even exist in 1998. It was founded in 2003, and was acquired by Apple in 2008.
- amalcon 3y ago
  That confused me a bit, thanks. In '98, Macs still used PPC architecture, and the IPhone didn't exist. I don't know what kind of CPU the IPod was using at the time -- I'd guess ARM. Still, that seemed like it could get away with an off the shelf CPU -- buying a bunch of chip design talent doesn't seem like it would be super rational then.
  - leejoramo 3y ago
    The Newton was Apple’s first big usage of ARM https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton
  - masklinn 3y ago
    iPod was only released in 2001, though, and the idea to make a PMP only really got steam in 2000, with much of the work only happening after Fadell was urgency is how Apple got to contract out much of the work, even he was initially contracted before getting fully hired when his proof of concept got the nod). OTOH the ill-fated Newton was also ARM-based. As well as the emate pseudo-laptop.
  - classichasclass 3y ago
    For that matter, PA Semi was itself a Power licensee. They were developing the PA6T, which might have been in whatever the next PowerBook would have been. After the purchase, Apple still had to make promises about its availability because it was being used in some military applications even though they would never use the PA6T in one of their own machines. I think the AmigaOne X1000 was the only generally available computer that ever used it.
- leejoramo 3y ago
helsinkiandrew 3y ago
I remember my time using an Alpha AXP nearly 30 years ago being the fastest computer I've ever used - I imagine my current laptop is far superior in speed by orders of magnitude, but the applications hadn't caught up with the CPU available. It was also probably the most reliable. We never switched off or even logged out of the machines for 6 months to a year at a time.
- tgv 3y ago
  We had DECstations. They were great systems for the day. Only a few years later, they were overtaken in speed and price by (IIRC) 486 systems with Linux; I think those were cheaper than the tape cartridge unit on which we got the system updates. DEC never recovered.
- postmodest 3y ago
  Your current _watch_ is faster than an Alpha AXP. (If you have an Apple Watch) the early ones only pushed in the low hundreds of MIPS. It's crazy to me how my whole-ass DECServer with 2x EV4's wouldn't even be a good peripheral for portable computers today, and it could run hundreds of interactive user sessions.
  - mpweiher 3y ago
    Our school's PDP-11/34 ( 16 bit, 128K RAM, 5 + 5 Megabyte disk drives) supported about 20 interactive users at a time. We did reduce the baud rate on the ADM-3 terminals to 1200 so the I/O buffering would smooth over some of the swapping.
    - NikkiA 3y ago
      The big leap up from VMS in terms of performant concurrent users for us was when we switched to using a Sequent Symmetry, now that's another long dead system giant. Poor Dynix.
- ilyt 3y ago
  > but the applications hadn't caught up with the CPU available. They did. Developers just chose to use it on abstractions rather than making faster apps...
whitej125 3y ago
Very nostalgic to see the recent DEC/digital talk on HN lately. My first job out of college I wrote C++ on OpenVMS (originally on Alpha). I remember when we had to port to OpenVMS Itanium. Biggest pita was floating point conversion. Alpha used VAX float while Itanium used the IEEE standard. I laughed the first time I saw the exit code "%SYSTEM-W-FISH, my hovercraft is full of eels". I still to this day own a copy of "Writing real programs in DCL". Looks like a collectors item, hahaha! I also somewhat miss the mainframe development. We had a fantastic (albeit homegrown) build system and architecture (thin client, thick server - all C++) that was hugely enabling. Was super slick and easy to build, you could easily create previews for product people to run and test. Really tight development loops... loved it.
- panick21_ 3y ago
  Alpha actually supported both VAX and IEEE. But I guess people on VMS wanted to stay VAX compatable.
Communitivity 3y ago
I remember when the department I worked in got two DEC Alphas, we were amazed and quite happy.
drewg123 3y ago
DEC was a big part of my life in the 90s. My first internship was working on a SCADA system on Vaxstations running VMS. My mom had to help me learn FORTRAN for this. (we were all unix/c at school). My first job was as a sysadmin starting in 93 for an academic stats dept that used DECstations and were getting their first DEC alphas running OSF/1. A lot of my job at first consisted of getting the open source applications they needed running in 64 bit mode (you would not believe how many int/pointer conversions I had to fix). I remember adding a memory kit to a 3000/500 in the first month of working there. That memory kit had a retail value higher than my annual salary at the time & it was terrifying. My next job was as research staff at at a comp sci dept doing OS research. I wrote drivers for Myricom NICs for DEC OSF/1. (and had the funniest bug.. we had to use GCC to compile the drivers, and I missed the no-fp-reg directive, so every time the driver was active, it was using floating point registers as general registers and corrupting users fp state.. You'd see applications crashing left and right with FP exceptions). A few years later, the same dept paid me full time to help port FreeBSD to the DEC alpha, and I maintained FreeBSD/alpha until alpha was walking dead, and we killed the FreeBSD/alpha port. I got one of the first API UP1000s (one of the 3rd party alphas that used the irongate chipset from AMD), and it was my workstation running FreeBSD/alpha for years.
intrasight 3y ago
In the early 2000s, I had a gig at AccuWeather rewriting from the ground up a non-weather web application. My work was on Windows 2000. They bought me a new Dell server for that purpose had let me have at it. But at that time, all of their main machines were VAX VMS - including their weather web servers. Even then it caused me to reminisce on time spent on DEC VT100 and VT220s in the graduate terminal room at CMU. Anyone remember the DEC Rainbow? My local university where I took classes during high school had some. Great keyboards just like the VT terminals. DEC keyboards where the benchmark against which I compared all other since - most came up wanting.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- cbm-vic-20 3y ago
  > Great keyboards just like the VT terminals. Eehh.. The VT100 keyboards were good, but the VT220 and beyond use the LK201 and LK401 keyboards, which use mushy rubber-dome switches.
- rbanffy 3y ago
  > Even then it caused me to reminisce on time spent on DEC VT100 and VT220s in the graduate terminal room at CMU. Sounds terrible. They should at least have given you VT230 or 240's, which were capable of Tek 4014 and ReGIS graphics...
Sylamore 3y ago
The early days of DirecTV were actually a partnership between Hughes Electronics, USSB, Thompson Consumer Electronics (RCA), and DIGITAL. Hughes provided the satellite tech and some FCC licenses, USSB some FCC licenses, Thompson built the set top boxes, and DIGITAL ran all of the technology. Until DirecTV started to in-source their own IT operations in the mid-2000s, all of the systems to run the business were in DIGITAL facilities (the same campus where StorageWorks R&D and early manufacturing was done) in Colorado Springs. To this day, all those Colorado Springs hosted systems running Billing, Account Management and CRM are in the dec.com domain. HP-UX has replaced most of the OSF/1 stuff by the time I joined in 2011, but OpenVMS was just being upgraded from Alpha to Itanium boxes. I doubt it will survive to make the transition to x86, but it it still the backend for most billing and account management via STMS. Some of the billing was migrated to AT&T systems, but we halted that project because it substantially increased customer churn just migrating them from STMS to Enabler and changing the bill format, even if amounts didn't change. I guess it reminded folks that AT&T was in charge now.
zippyman55 3y ago
DEC was so great! I still have my VAX 780 pen. Nothing bad to say.
nologic01 3y ago
It is not frequently that one gets really pleased with a computing device so when it happens the memory lingers for a looong time. So it happened with the DEC Alpha. I vaguely recall that its overall desktop experience was less polished than the SUN workstations of that era, but its raw performance made up for it as it woud allow you to accomplish things previously beyond reach. A similarly memorably experience would be quite elusive these days. For one thing the very concept of a powerful workstation is kinda old fashioned. But who knows, maybe the era of an "AI PC" will recreate some of the magic :-)
- pishpash 3y ago
  Is anyone making an actual AI PC? Not marketing hype using words for their existing efforts.
  - nologic01 3y ago
    There is no actual AI PC as far as I know. But that does not mean that the choice of marketing hype does not provide a signal about current vendor's mindset. Notice that it is not a "Blockchain PC" or a "VR/AR PC" they are peddling, to mention some plausible recent hype candidates one could use :-).
    - rbanffy 3y ago
      I would imagine an "AI PC" to have a UI heavily based on the idea of anticipating and preparing for future user actions and needs, making the next likely action easier, as well as being conversational. I also imagine voice-prompted conversational interfaces with multimedia responses, and constant gesture/posture input - as in head tracking for parallax adjustment and eye tracking for prioritizing screen updates.
growingkittens 3y ago
As I understand it, Digital changed significantly after Ken Olsen left.
dctoedt 3y ago
Seeing David Cutler mentioned brought back memories: Back in the late 1980s I wrote a patent (now long expired) for DEC in which Cutler was one of two co-inventors: "Radix-16 divider using overlapped quotient bit selection and concurrent quotient rounding and correction." [0] I've always faintly regretted that I never got to interact directly with Cutler — although the lead inventor, Dr. Ted Kehl (RIP) [1], was great to work with. [0] https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloadPdf/5132925 https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloa... [1] https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/seattletimes/name/theodore-kehl-obituary?id=13252890 https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/seattletimes/name/theod...
- trentnelson 3y ago
  Interesting that Cutler was working on circuit-oriented stuff that late in the 80s? Or was this invented much earlier, just patented later? He was courted by Microsoft in '89, so this patent looks like it went through after he'd left DEC, which I guess explains why you didn't have the opportunity to interact with him. I'd be interested in hearing more about this though!
  - dctoedt 3y ago
    The link I posted is public information; I can't say more than that (and don't remember much in any case). Normally the "prosecution history" documents would be available online [0], because they're also a public record, but for this patent that doesn't appear to be the case (it was a long time ago, so possibly the USPTO just hasn't yet digitized the documents). It's been some time since I did patent-application work so I'm probably not up to date on USPTO procedures and resources. [0] https://patentcenter.uspto.gov/applications/07233378/ifw/transactions?application= https://patentcenter.uspto.gov/applications/07233378/ifw/tra...
- sillywalk 3y ago
  Random Question, but as a DEC employee, do you know why their processors are prefixed with KA ?
  - 3y ago
sizzzzlerz 3y ago
From programming a viterbi codec on a PDP 11 in assembly to writing mapping software in C on the 11/780 running VMS in the 80's, I've had a long exposure to DEC and it's products and it has always been a joy. I don't think there was another period in my entire career where I was more productive, learned so much, and had fun doing it. Even though I'd moved off DEC by that time, it was truly a sad day when DEC was bought by COMPAQ and was no more.
ajross 3y ago
Gotta complain about whoever did the visual layout for this article. Their representative hardware was... a rando mid-80's ECL mainframe and a VAXstation? The company produced some of the most impactful hardware in history and these are the devices you think should be shown? If there's a VAX, we should see the 11/780. The user-facing device should be a VT100, or plausibly an AlphaStation. Other good choices are a PDP-6 (or PDP-10) or PDP-11/45. The images in the article are just bad clip art.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- m3047 3y ago
  "BAKC": When you care to steal the very best.
mikewarot 3y ago
I've always had a soft spot for the VAX 11-780, I now have one running VAX/VMS in my phone, thanks to SimH.
- rbanffy 3y ago
  I have a weekend project to make SimH runnable as a Docker Swarm service like I did with some Hercules images. I need to figure out how to make SimH consoles and terminals appear as listening sockets. BTW, just released a new version at https://github.com/rbanffy/vm370 https://github.com/rbanffy/vm370
schumackerd 3y ago
echo VMS | tr A-Za-z B-ZAb-za ==> WNT
GeekyBear 3y ago
Although the article mentions similarities between VMS and Windows NT, it downplays just how extensive a debt NT owed to VMS. Microsoft's Azure CTO wrote about it back in the day: >In developing NT, these designers rewrote VMS in C, cleaning up, tuning, tweaking, and adding some new functionality and capabilities as they went. This statement is in danger of trivializing their efforts; after all, the designers built a new API (i.e., Win32), a new file system (i.e., NTFS), and a new graphical interface subsystem and administrative environment while maintaining backward compatibility with DOS, OS/2, POSIX, and Win16. Nevertheless, the migration of VMS internals to NT was so thorough that within a few weeks of NT's release, Digital engineers noticed the striking similarities. Those similarities could fill a book. In fact, you can read sections of VAX/VMS Internals and Data Structures (Digital Press) as an accurate description of NT internals simply by translating VMS terms to NT terms. ... "Why the Fastest Chip Didn't Win" (Business Week, April 28, 1997) states that when Digital engineers noticed the similarities between VMS and NT, they brought their observations to senior management. Rather than suing, Digital cut a deal with Microsoft. In the summer of 1995, Digital announced Affinity for OpenVMS, a program that required Microsoft to help train Digital NT technicians, help promote NT and Open-VMS as two pieces of a three-tiered client/server networking solution, and promise to maintain NT support for the Alpha processor. Microsoft also paid Digital between 65 million and 100 million dollars. https://www.itprotoday.com/compute-engines/windows-nt-and-vms-rest-story https://www.itprotoday.com/compute-engines/windows-nt-and-vm...
- sneed_chucker 3y ago
  Yeah I mean the fact that David Cutler and ~20 other VMS engineers were poached directly from DEC to work on Windows NT basically says it all.
- sillywalk 3y ago
  I don't know if this is true, but Microsoft (or Cutler ) allegedly stole some of the MICA source code and used it in Windows NT. "According to inside sources, many portions of NT’s code and even the comments were identical to Mica. As a result, Digital sued Microsoft. Microsoft and Digital settled out of court and the result was the Digital/Microsoft Alliance. " [0][1] [0] https://www.itprotoday.com/compute-engines/death-alpha-nt https://www.itprotoday.com/compute-engines/death-alpha-nt [1] https://techmonitor.ai/technology/dec_forced_microsoft_into_alliance_with_legal_threat https://techmonitor.ai/technology/dec_forced_microsoft_into_...
dekhn 3y ago
DEC made a big impact on me when I was growing up in the late 80s and early 90s, and even through the mid 2000s; from learning C on eagle.wesleyan.edu (VAX/VMS) to writing my undergrad thesis C++ on zoltar.ucsc.edu (alpha running dec UNIX) to socrates.cgl.ucsf.edu (alpha cluster running TruCluster) and later geneland.gene.com (alpha cluster running trucluster). The DECs were uniformly excellent, with great CPU and memory performance, along with good compilers and OS (IMHO TruCluster is the last of the great UNICES). I never bought one myself, too expensive. Since then I've gone back and learned a lot of history about DEC, specifically how the series of PDPs were made. They had a huge impact on scientific analysis, making high speed experimental data collection and complex realtime logic relatively easy to implement.
LgWoodenBadger 3y ago
The year before my freshman year of college, the Computer Science department required students to purchase either a DECStation or an Alpha. My year the required hardware was an IBM (literal) PC. I was so disappointed. My 75mhz pentium couldn't play mp3s without stuttering. I still dream about what the Alpha would have been like.
rawoke083600 3y ago
My 14 year old self DREAMED of owning a DEC Alpha64 !! I remember it being on the cover of LinuxJournal around 90's I could think/desire nothing else for 6 months :( RIP!
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
  % a.out Segmentation Fault (unaligned access) but it worked on Solaris!
PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
I found it strange not to mention Altavista. Granted, google ate AV's lunch when they emerged, but as someone who was on the web as it started hitting CS departments (even the one where the first web spider was created), AltaVista was the thing that made the idea of a "search engine" actually seem like it was going to be a thing. Sure, sure, pagerank was a huge step up (at the time), and larry & sergey would likely have gone down pretty much that path no matter what. But before Google, there was Altavista: fast, feeling comprehensive and pointing the way into the future.
- panick21_ 3y ago
  They went to DEC and wanted to join them. DEC was not interested
- sillywalk 3y ago
  Wow, I forgot about that Altavista (and Hotbot and ...) The Hardware Behind AltaVista [0] AltaVista: AlphaStation 500, 256 MB memory, 6GB disk. AlphaStation 500's handle all external traffic to the site. They run a custom multi-threaded Web server which sends queries to the Web indexer and News indexer. Web Indexer: AlphaServer 8400 5/300, 10 processors, 6 GB memory, 210 GB RAID disk. This model is the most powerful computer built by Digital. These servers run the query engine. The Web index is larger than 40 GB, but most requests take less than a second. Scooter: AlphaServer 4100 5/300, 1.5 GB memory, 30 GB RAID disk. The super-spider runs from this machine. It fetches pages from the Web and sends them to Vista, our primary web indexer. Vista: AlphaServer 4100 5/300, 2 processors, 2GB memory, 180GB RAID disk. This machine indexes Scooter output and serves as a central distribution point for new index data. News Indexer: AlphaServer 600 5/333, 896MB memory, 13 GB disk. This machine keeps an up-to-date index of the news spool: since new articles appear and old articles expire all the time, it is in fact quite busy, even though the index it serves is much smaller than the Web index. News Server: AlphaServer 600 5/333, 896MB memory, 24 GB RAID disks. It maintains a current news spool for the News Indexer. It also serves the articles via http to those of you who don't want to know about news servers but want to read news. " [0] https://groups.google.com/g/comp.unix.tru64/c/aB_z5YXwNMI https://groups.google.com/g/comp.unix.tru64/c/aB_z5YXwNMI
- dekhn 3y ago
trentnelson 3y ago
Cutler retired?!
m3047 3y ago
I find it odd that there is no mention of RMS, the userspace filesystem view on VMS. It supported sequential, block (a.k.a. "relative") and indexed files; sequential output (the DCL command was TYPE rather than cat or more) was transparent (i.e. indexed file output was in primary key order). This was done at the file system level. TLDR: The VMS file system supported key/value storage off the shelf (with multiple key views!). I accidentally crashed a production VAX from userspace via an unaligned disk read on a unibus compatibility driver (they were also using the disk they assigned me for testing for swap; virtual memory machines don't run so well when the swap drive bug checks and goes offline) while developing a RSTS block I/O emulator. I later had a small consulting gig writing a USB driver for NT. The people who hired me said that because I had experience with VMS drivers I'd be able to do it; not knowing different I said "ok" and I guess they were right.
- sillywalk 3y ago
  Some kind of built-in records/database stuff in the filesystem seemed to be common for mini-computers (and mainframes). Like you mentioned, DEC had RMS(record management systems). IBM System/38 & AS/400 had a built in DB2, and I believe System/36 had something similar. HP 3000's MPE had records in the filesystem I think (it also came with the TurboImage database, though I think that was on top of the MPE filesystem) Tandem Guardian had Enscribe.
  - m3047 3y ago
    Along with RDB (DEC's SQL DB implementation) and DBMS-32 (DEC's CODASYL implementation), the CDD ("Common Data Dictionary") was built on top of the KODA engine. CDD wasn't really free with the operating system, but it was ubiquitous. I spent some time hacking on that too for the report wizard people. I concur, the notion of "an army marches on its data" was an intrinsic in those environments. It also extended to related technologies such as networking, messaging, lambdas (DECNet Network Objects), and [edit: distributed, cluster-wide] locking. Obviously there are echos of this in today's cloud and other tightly integrated offerings. You might not agree with the entirety of the vendor implementation, but there was undeniably one to disagree with. The report wizard people competed directly with Datatrieve, along with being bundled with for instance a large ERP package.
myvoiceismypprt 3y ago
[dead]
Perenti 3y ago
No mention of the DecSystem-10 or 20. I loved TOPS-20. How those machines ran so well with so many users and so little ram is a lesson in efficiency.
rbanffy 3y ago
Also DLT, which was sold to Quantum and beget LTO, which is what stores our civilization's data if we need to do serious disaster recovery (as in when all stand-by replicas die at the same time and we need to restore it from off-site tapes).

143 points by sohkamyung 3y ago

Worked with OpenVMS for a few years. It was great fun and lots of stories from the older colleagues who used to work at 'digital'.

flyinghamster 3y ago

It probably would have made the article too long to discuss the earlier 12-, 18-, and 36-bit systems, as well as the 16-bit PDP-11 and its outsize influence on later systems. However, a key point also is lost: DEC's early dismissal of personal computers, only to have them catch up to and eat the entire minicomputer category. Their early micros were half-hearted; the Rainbow 100 ran MS-DOS but was not PC compatible, and even lacked a FORMAT command for formatting floppy disks (you were expected to only buy preformatted disks without hub rings because they damaged the RX50 drive mechanism). The Professional 300 series, based on PDP-11 architecture, was deliberately made not fully compatible to existing PDP-11 minicomputers (and also had that RX50 floppy drive). They were so worried about cannibalizing their own business that they forgot that they could get eaten by their new competitors instead.

ghaff 3y ago
>the Rainbow 100 ran MS-DOS but was not PC compatible Compatibility with computer systems from other manufacturers was such an alien concept to the minicomputer makers that they all pretty much genuinely thought they were doing a great job by being mostly MS/PC-DOS compatible. A common compatibility test was whether a system could run unmodified Microsoft Flight Simulator out of the box. Most couldn't.
- panick21_ 3y ago
  It was a thing in computers and mainframes. Lots of IBM copies. But I think more importantly they literally released 3 different computer personal systems literally on the same day. That was totally ridiclous. Use your PDP11 stuff to compete head to head with PC or go PC compatable, half and half is bad. And then the also had CM/S at the same time. That a totally crazy and wasteful strategy. The Rainbow guy then went to Sun and build the i386, another non PC compatable that failed. But arguable that one was actually a good idea.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Fair enough about plug-compatible mainframes. Though that probably was able to happen to at least some degree because IBM was acutely aware of anti-trust scrutiny.
    - panick21_ 3y ago
      I mean even before IBM was dominate, after IBM moved to 360. Honeywell copied some of the older mainframes and made lots of sales. Cloning has been a thing in computing for a while and there is no legal way to stop it in many cases. But I'm not an expert on that.
retrac 3y ago
Yes. The MicroVAX I and II were IC implementations of the original VAX. Vax on a chip. (Two different implementations. Low and high end.) They were designed and manufactured in-house by DEC, and were for sale in VAX minicomputer products by late 1984, early 1985 in volume. In 1984, the only full 32-bit microprocessor that was actually available for a workstation or personal computer was the Motorola 68020. The Intel 386 wouldn't be out until late 1985. > They were so worried about cannibalizing their own business that they forgot that they could get eaten by their new competitors instead. There is perhaps an alternate history, where DEC started making 32-bit workstations and high-end personal computers around then as a major push, and not in the late 1980s as an afterthought. Though by 1984, IBM was starting to feel the pressure from competition in the low-end PC market. DEC would have felt that pressure! They were selling PC compatibles already. Margins were razor-thin, sales were impersonal. Exact opposite of how DEC usually operated. No surprise management saw it as a risky sector to further expand in.
- flyinghamster 3y ago
  Yup, I can see how they might not want to become a consumer product maker. Yet they could have parlayed the LSI-11 and successors into the position of Intel, IBM, and Microsoft combined, and flat-out owned a big chunk of personal computing, even if they stayed behind the scenes selling chipsets and software. Indeed it could be said that the PDP-1 was one of the world's first personal computers, but it was still a school/enterprise machine at a school/enterprise price.
panick21_ 3y ago
The PC is not why DEC failed really. And by 1992 they actually had a profitable PC buissness unit. Plenty of manufactures make mostly server stuff. That really the issue, they failed on continung to be dominate in bigger servers. And much of their revenue depended on support contracts. If you sell less systems and those systems are less depenpended on you Unix/NT then there is just gone be less revenue.
sillywalk 3y ago
They also invested $Billions in the VAX 9000, to try and get back at the high-end mainframe market, but it was delayed, and the NVAX chip was almost as fast, but in a desktop form-factor for a fraction of the price.
- lproven 3y ago
  This. A vital detail that explains much else, which goes unmentioned in this terrible article. And MICA/PRISM. And Unix. And the PDP series. And the OS/2 connection. And so much more.
  - sillywalk 3y ago
    OS/2 connection? A cursory search didn't turn up anything.
    - lproven 3y ago
      Windows NT wasn't a new ground-up project. It's based on some OS/2 code and design. When IBM and MS fell out and divorced over the OS/2 project, there were 3 versions of OS/2 underway: • OS/2 1, 16-bit, for the 80286 • OS/2 2, 32-bit, for the 80386 • OS/2 3, 32-bit, CPU-independent and cross-platform. IBM kept v2, finished it, and released OS/2 2, 2.1, 3, 4 & 4.5. V3 and after were codenamed "Warp" but the company failed to negotiate with the owners of Star Trek for a marketing deal. MS kept OS/2 3, the planned CPU-independent version. Dave Cutler and his team at DEC were angry at DEC management because DEC cancelled the Mica cross-platform OS and PRISM RISC CPU to run it. Cutler was head-hunted by MS and given OS/2 3 to finish and make work. The project was originally developed on the Intel i860 RISC chip, codenamed N10. (8086, 286, 386, 486 = X86. 86 * 10 = 860 = i860.) So it was called OS/2 NT for N-Ten. While work was underway, Windows 3 became a huge hit. The company worked out a 32-bit version of the Windows API, called Win32, and renamed OS/2 NT to "Windows NT". Yes, there is a lot of VMS design in the NT design, but it's not direct inheritance: it's because Cutler was planning a CPU-independent VMS with "personalities" that could run binaries from other OSes, such as DOS and UNIX. And aside from that, there is also a fair chunk of OS/2. NT 3.x could use OS/2 HPFS disk volumes, run text-mode OS/2 binaries, and had an optional extra Presentation Manager add-on to run graphical OS/2 binaries.

ElectricalUnion 3y ago

I was expecting a mention of how DEC Video Terminal hardware terminal inline escape sequences are still very relevant as a de facto terminal standard.

kps 3y ago
Most of the ones in common use now are an actual terminal standard, ANSI X3.64 aka ISO 6429 aka ECMA-48¹. Most of the others in common use come from xterm extensions. ¹ https://www.ecma-international.org/wp-content/uploads/ECMA-48_5th_edition_june_1991.pdf https://www.ecma-international.org/wp-content/uploads/ECMA-4...

octotoad 3y ago

> Dan Dobberpuhl was one of the original Alpha designers before he left DEC to start a chip design firm called P.A. Semi, which Apple bought in 1998 for its talent to work on their Arm processors. P.A. Semi didn't even exist in 1998. It was founded in 2003, and was acquired by Apple in 2008.

amalcon 3y ago
That confused me a bit, thanks. In '98, Macs still used PPC architecture, and the IPhone didn't exist. I don't know what kind of CPU the IPod was using at the time -- I'd guess ARM. Still, that seemed like it could get away with an off the shelf CPU -- buying a bunch of chip design talent doesn't seem like it would be super rational then.
- leejoramo 3y ago
  The Newton was Apple’s first big usage of ARM https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton
- masklinn 3y ago
  iPod was only released in 2001, though, and the idea to make a PMP only really got steam in 2000, with much of the work only happening after Fadell was urgency is how Apple got to contract out much of the work, even he was initially contracted before getting fully hired when his proof of concept got the nod). OTOH the ill-fated Newton was also ARM-based. As well as the emate pseudo-laptop.
- classichasclass 3y ago
  For that matter, PA Semi was itself a Power licensee. They were developing the PA6T, which might have been in whatever the next PowerBook would have been. After the purchase, Apple still had to make promises about its availability because it was being used in some military applications even though they would never use the PA6T in one of their own machines. I think the AmigaOne X1000 was the only generally available computer that ever used it.
leejoramo 3y ago

helsinkiandrew 3y ago

I remember my time using an Alpha AXP nearly 30 years ago being the fastest computer I've ever used - I imagine my current laptop is far superior in speed by orders of magnitude, but the applications hadn't caught up with the CPU available. It was also probably the most reliable. We never switched off or even logged out of the machines for 6 months to a year at a time.

tgv 3y ago
We had DECstations. They were great systems for the day. Only a few years later, they were overtaken in speed and price by (IIRC) 486 systems with Linux; I think those were cheaper than the tape cartridge unit on which we got the system updates. DEC never recovered.
postmodest 3y ago
Your current _watch_ is faster than an Alpha AXP. (If you have an Apple Watch) the early ones only pushed in the low hundreds of MIPS. It's crazy to me how my whole-ass DECServer with 2x EV4's wouldn't even be a good peripheral for portable computers today, and it could run hundreds of interactive user sessions.
- mpweiher 3y ago
  Our school's PDP-11/34 ( 16 bit, 128K RAM, 5 + 5 Megabyte disk drives) supported about 20 interactive users at a time. We did reduce the baud rate on the ADM-3 terminals to 1200 so the I/O buffering would smooth over some of the swapping.
  - NikkiA 3y ago
    The big leap up from VMS in terms of performant concurrent users for us was when we switched to using a Sequent Symmetry, now that's another long dead system giant. Poor Dynix.
ilyt 3y ago
> but the applications hadn't caught up with the CPU available. They did. Developers just chose to use it on abstractions rather than making faster apps...

whitej125 3y ago

Very nostalgic to see the recent DEC/digital talk on HN lately. My first job out of college I wrote C++ on OpenVMS (originally on Alpha). I remember when we had to port to OpenVMS Itanium. Biggest pita was floating point conversion. Alpha used VAX float while Itanium used the IEEE standard. I laughed the first time I saw the exit code "%SYSTEM-W-FISH, my hovercraft is full of eels". I still to this day own a copy of "Writing real programs in DCL". Looks like a collectors item, hahaha! I also somewhat miss the mainframe development. We had a fantastic (albeit homegrown) build system and architecture (thin client, thick server - all C++) that was hugely enabling. Was super slick and easy to build, you could easily create previews for product people to run and test. Really tight development loops... loved it.

panick21_ 3y ago
Alpha actually supported both VAX and IEEE. But I guess people on VMS wanted to stay VAX compatable.

Communitivity 3y ago

I remember when the department I worked in got two DEC Alphas, we were amazed and quite happy.

drewg123 3y ago

DEC was a big part of my life in the 90s. My first internship was working on a SCADA system on Vaxstations running VMS. My mom had to help me learn FORTRAN for this. (we were all unix/c at school). My first job was as a sysadmin starting in 93 for an academic stats dept that used DECstations and were getting their first DEC alphas running OSF/1. A lot of my job at first consisted of getting the open source applications they needed running in 64 bit mode (you would not believe how many int/pointer conversions I had to fix). I remember adding a memory kit to a 3000/500 in the first month of working there. That memory kit had a retail value higher than my annual salary at the time & it was terrifying. My next job was as research staff at at a comp sci dept doing OS research. I wrote drivers for Myricom NICs for DEC OSF/1. (and had the funniest bug.. we had to use GCC to compile the drivers, and I missed the no-fp-reg directive, so every time the driver was active, it was using floating point registers as general registers and corrupting users fp state.. You'd see applications crashing left and right with FP exceptions). A few years later, the same dept paid me full time to help port FreeBSD to the DEC alpha, and I maintained FreeBSD/alpha until alpha was walking dead, and we killed the FreeBSD/alpha port. I got one of the first API UP1000s (one of the 3rd party alphas that used the irongate chipset from AMD), and it was my workstation running FreeBSD/alpha for years.

intrasight 3y ago

In the early 2000s, I had a gig at AccuWeather rewriting from the ground up a non-weather web application. My work was on Windows 2000. They bought me a new Dell server for that purpose had let me have at it. But at that time, all of their main machines were VAX VMS - including their weather web servers. Even then it caused me to reminisce on time spent on DEC VT100 and VT220s in the graduate terminal room at CMU. Anyone remember the DEC Rainbow? My local university where I took classes during high school had some. Great keyboards just like the VT terminals. DEC keyboards where the benchmark against which I compared all other since - most came up wanting.

deleted 3y ago
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cbm-vic-20 3y ago
> Great keyboards just like the VT terminals. Eehh.. The VT100 keyboards were good, but the VT220 and beyond use the LK201 and LK401 keyboards, which use mushy rubber-dome switches.
rbanffy 3y ago
> Even then it caused me to reminisce on time spent on DEC VT100 and VT220s in the graduate terminal room at CMU. Sounds terrible. They should at least have given you VT230 or 240's, which were capable of Tek 4014 and ReGIS graphics...

Sylamore 3y ago

The early days of DirecTV were actually a partnership between Hughes Electronics, USSB, Thompson Consumer Electronics (RCA), and DIGITAL. Hughes provided the satellite tech and some FCC licenses, USSB some FCC licenses, Thompson built the set top boxes, and DIGITAL ran all of the technology. Until DirecTV started to in-source their own IT operations in the mid-2000s, all of the systems to run the business were in DIGITAL facilities (the same campus where StorageWorks R&D and early manufacturing was done) in Colorado Springs. To this day, all those Colorado Springs hosted systems running Billing, Account Management and CRM are in the dec.com domain. HP-UX has replaced most of the OSF/1 stuff by the time I joined in 2011, but OpenVMS was just being upgraded from Alpha to Itanium boxes. I doubt it will survive to make the transition to x86, but it it still the backend for most billing and account management via STMS. Some of the billing was migrated to AT&T systems, but we halted that project because it substantially increased customer churn just migrating them from STMS to Enabler and changing the bill format, even if amounts didn't change. I guess it reminded folks that AT&T was in charge now.

zippyman55 3y ago

DEC was so great! I still have my VAX 780 pen. Nothing bad to say.

nologic01 3y ago

It is not frequently that one gets really pleased with a computing device so when it happens the memory lingers for a looong time. So it happened with the DEC Alpha. I vaguely recall that its overall desktop experience was less polished than the SUN workstations of that era, but its raw performance made up for it as it woud allow you to accomplish things previously beyond reach. A similarly memorably experience would be quite elusive these days. For one thing the very concept of a powerful workstation is kinda old fashioned. But who knows, maybe the era of an "AI PC" will recreate some of the magic :-)

pishpash 3y ago
Is anyone making an actual AI PC? Not marketing hype using words for their existing efforts.
- nologic01 3y ago
  There is no actual AI PC as far as I know. But that does not mean that the choice of marketing hype does not provide a signal about current vendor's mindset. Notice that it is not a "Blockchain PC" or a "VR/AR PC" they are peddling, to mention some plausible recent hype candidates one could use :-).
  - rbanffy 3y ago
    I would imagine an "AI PC" to have a UI heavily based on the idea of anticipating and preparing for future user actions and needs, making the next likely action easier, as well as being conversational. I also imagine voice-prompted conversational interfaces with multimedia responses, and constant gesture/posture input - as in head tracking for parallax adjustment and eye tracking for prioritizing screen updates.

growingkittens 3y ago

As I understand it, Digital changed significantly after Ken Olsen left.

dctoedt 3y ago

Seeing David Cutler mentioned brought back memories: Back in the late 1980s I wrote a patent (now long expired) for DEC in which Cutler was one of two co-inventors: "Radix-16 divider using overlapped quotient bit selection and concurrent quotient rounding and correction." [0] I've always faintly regretted that I never got to interact directly with Cutler — although the lead inventor, Dr. Ted Kehl (RIP) [1], was great to work with. [0] https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloadPdf/5132925 https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloa... [1] https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/seattletimes/name/theodore-kehl-obituary?id=13252890 https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/seattletimes/name/theod...

trentnelson 3y ago
Interesting that Cutler was working on circuit-oriented stuff that late in the 80s? Or was this invented much earlier, just patented later? He was courted by Microsoft in '89, so this patent looks like it went through after he'd left DEC, which I guess explains why you didn't have the opportunity to interact with him. I'd be interested in hearing more about this though!
- dctoedt 3y ago
  The link I posted is public information; I can't say more than that (and don't remember much in any case). Normally the "prosecution history" documents would be available online [0], because they're also a public record, but for this patent that doesn't appear to be the case (it was a long time ago, so possibly the USPTO just hasn't yet digitized the documents). It's been some time since I did patent-application work so I'm probably not up to date on USPTO procedures and resources. [0] https://patentcenter.uspto.gov/applications/07233378/ifw/transactions?application= https://patentcenter.uspto.gov/applications/07233378/ifw/tra...
sillywalk 3y ago
Random Question, but as a DEC employee, do you know why their processors are prefixed with KA ?
- 3y ago

sizzzzlerz 3y ago

From programming a viterbi codec on a PDP 11 in assembly to writing mapping software in C on the 11/780 running VMS in the 80's, I've had a long exposure to DEC and it's products and it has always been a joy. I don't think there was another period in my entire career where I was more productive, learned so much, and had fun doing it. Even though I'd moved off DEC by that time, it was truly a sad day when DEC was bought by COMPAQ and was no more.

ajross 3y ago

Gotta complain about whoever did the visual layout for this article. Their representative hardware was... a rando mid-80's ECL mainframe and a VAXstation? The company produced some of the most impactful hardware in history and these are the devices you think should be shown? If there's a VAX, we should see the 11/780. The user-facing device should be a VT100, or plausibly an AlphaStation. Other good choices are a PDP-6 (or PDP-10) or PDP-11/45. The images in the article are just bad clip art.

deleted 3y ago
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m3047 3y ago
"BAKC": When you care to steal the very best.

mikewarot 3y ago

I've always had a soft spot for the VAX 11-780, I now have one running VAX/VMS in my phone, thanks to SimH.

rbanffy 3y ago
I have a weekend project to make SimH runnable as a Docker Swarm service like I did with some Hercules images. I need to figure out how to make SimH consoles and terminals appear as listening sockets. BTW, just released a new version at https://github.com/rbanffy/vm370 https://github.com/rbanffy/vm370

schumackerd 3y ago

echo VMS | tr A-Za-z B-ZAb-za ==> WNT

GeekyBear 3y ago

Although the article mentions similarities between VMS and Windows NT, it downplays just how extensive a debt NT owed to VMS. Microsoft's Azure CTO wrote about it back in the day: >In developing NT, these designers rewrote VMS in C, cleaning up, tuning, tweaking, and adding some new functionality and capabilities as they went. This statement is in danger of trivializing their efforts; after all, the designers built a new API (i.e., Win32), a new file system (i.e., NTFS), and a new graphical interface subsystem and administrative environment while maintaining backward compatibility with DOS, OS/2, POSIX, and Win16. Nevertheless, the migration of VMS internals to NT was so thorough that within a few weeks of NT's release, Digital engineers noticed the striking similarities. Those similarities could fill a book. In fact, you can read sections of VAX/VMS Internals and Data Structures (Digital Press) as an accurate description of NT internals simply by translating VMS terms to NT terms. ... "Why the Fastest Chip Didn't Win" (Business Week, April 28, 1997) states that when Digital engineers noticed the similarities between VMS and NT, they brought their observations to senior management. Rather than suing, Digital cut a deal with Microsoft. In the summer of 1995, Digital announced Affinity for OpenVMS, a program that required Microsoft to help train Digital NT technicians, help promote NT and Open-VMS as two pieces of a three-tiered client/server networking solution, and promise to maintain NT support for the Alpha processor. Microsoft also paid Digital between 65 million and 100 million dollars. https://www.itprotoday.com/compute-engines/windows-nt-and-vms-rest-story https://www.itprotoday.com/compute-engines/windows-nt-and-vm...

sneed_chucker 3y ago
Yeah I mean the fact that David Cutler and ~20 other VMS engineers were poached directly from DEC to work on Windows NT basically says it all.
sillywalk 3y ago
I don't know if this is true, but Microsoft (or Cutler ) allegedly stole some of the MICA source code and used it in Windows NT. "According to inside sources, many portions of NT’s code and even the comments were identical to Mica. As a result, Digital sued Microsoft. Microsoft and Digital settled out of court and the result was the Digital/Microsoft Alliance. " [0][1] [0] https://www.itprotoday.com/compute-engines/death-alpha-nt https://www.itprotoday.com/compute-engines/death-alpha-nt [1] https://techmonitor.ai/technology/dec_forced_microsoft_into_alliance_with_legal_threat https://techmonitor.ai/technology/dec_forced_microsoft_into_...

dekhn 3y ago

DEC made a big impact on me when I was growing up in the late 80s and early 90s, and even through the mid 2000s; from learning C on eagle.wesleyan.edu (VAX/VMS) to writing my undergrad thesis C++ on zoltar.ucsc.edu (alpha running dec UNIX) to socrates.cgl.ucsf.edu (alpha cluster running TruCluster) and later geneland.gene.com (alpha cluster running trucluster). The DECs were uniformly excellent, with great CPU and memory performance, along with good compilers and OS (IMHO TruCluster is the last of the great UNICES). I never bought one myself, too expensive. Since then I've gone back and learned a lot of history about DEC, specifically how the series of PDPs were made. They had a huge impact on scientific analysis, making high speed experimental data collection and complex realtime logic relatively easy to implement.

LgWoodenBadger 3y ago

The year before my freshman year of college, the Computer Science department required students to purchase either a DECStation or an Alpha. My year the required hardware was an IBM (literal) PC. I was so disappointed. My 75mhz pentium couldn't play mp3s without stuttering. I still dream about what the Alpha would have been like.

rawoke083600 3y ago

My 14 year old self DREAMED of owning a DEC Alpha64 !! I remember it being on the cover of LinuxJournal around 90's I could think/desire nothing else for 6 months :( RIP!

PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
% a.out Segmentation Fault (unaligned access) but it worked on Solaris!

PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago

I found it strange not to mention Altavista. Granted, google ate AV's lunch when they emerged, but as someone who was on the web as it started hitting CS departments (even the one where the first web spider was created), AltaVista was the thing that made the idea of a "search engine" actually seem like it was going to be a thing. Sure, sure, pagerank was a huge step up (at the time), and larry & sergey would likely have gone down pretty much that path no matter what. But before Google, there was Altavista: fast, feeling comprehensive and pointing the way into the future.

panick21_ 3y ago
They went to DEC and wanted to join them. DEC was not interested
sillywalk 3y ago
Wow, I forgot about that Altavista (and Hotbot and ...) The Hardware Behind AltaVista [0] AltaVista: AlphaStation 500, 256 MB memory, 6GB disk. AlphaStation 500's handle all external traffic to the site. They run a custom multi-threaded Web server which sends queries to the Web indexer and News indexer. Web Indexer: AlphaServer 8400 5/300, 10 processors, 6 GB memory, 210 GB RAID disk. This model is the most powerful computer built by Digital. These servers run the query engine. The Web index is larger than 40 GB, but most requests take less than a second. Scooter: AlphaServer 4100 5/300, 1.5 GB memory, 30 GB RAID disk. The super-spider runs from this machine. It fetches pages from the Web and sends them to Vista, our primary web indexer. Vista: AlphaServer 4100 5/300, 2 processors, 2GB memory, 180GB RAID disk. This machine indexes Scooter output and serves as a central distribution point for new index data. News Indexer: AlphaServer 600 5/333, 896MB memory, 13 GB disk. This machine keeps an up-to-date index of the news spool: since new articles appear and old articles expire all the time, it is in fact quite busy, even though the index it serves is much smaller than the Web index. News Server: AlphaServer 600 5/333, 896MB memory, 24 GB RAID disks. It maintains a current news spool for the News Indexer. It also serves the articles via http to those of you who don't want to know about news servers but want to read news. " [0] https://groups.google.com/g/comp.unix.tru64/c/aB_z5YXwNMI https://groups.google.com/g/comp.unix.tru64/c/aB_z5YXwNMI
dekhn 3y ago

trentnelson 3y ago

Cutler retired?!

m3047 3y ago

I find it odd that there is no mention of RMS, the userspace filesystem view on VMS. It supported sequential, block (a.k.a. "relative") and indexed files; sequential output (the DCL command was TYPE rather than cat or more) was transparent (i.e. indexed file output was in primary key order). This was done at the file system level. TLDR: The VMS file system supported key/value storage off the shelf (with multiple key views!). I accidentally crashed a production VAX from userspace via an unaligned disk read on a unibus compatibility driver (they were also using the disk they assigned me for testing for swap; virtual memory machines don't run so well when the swap drive bug checks and goes offline) while developing a RSTS block I/O emulator. I later had a small consulting gig writing a USB driver for NT. The people who hired me said that because I had experience with VMS drivers I'd be able to do it; not knowing different I said "ok" and I guess they were right.

sillywalk 3y ago
Some kind of built-in records/database stuff in the filesystem seemed to be common for mini-computers (and mainframes). Like you mentioned, DEC had RMS(record management systems). IBM System/38 & AS/400 had a built in DB2, and I believe System/36 had something similar. HP 3000's MPE had records in the filesystem I think (it also came with the TurboImage database, though I think that was on top of the MPE filesystem) Tandem Guardian had Enscribe.
- m3047 3y ago
  Along with RDB (DEC's SQL DB implementation) and DBMS-32 (DEC's CODASYL implementation), the CDD ("Common Data Dictionary") was built on top of the KODA engine. CDD wasn't really free with the operating system, but it was ubiquitous. I spent some time hacking on that too for the report wizard people. I concur, the notion of "an army marches on its data" was an intrinsic in those environments. It also extended to related technologies such as networking, messaging, lambdas (DECNet Network Objects), and [edit: distributed, cluster-wide] locking. Obviously there are echos of this in today's cloud and other tightly integrated offerings. You might not agree with the entirety of the vendor implementation, but there was undeniably one to disagree with. The report wizard people competed directly with Datatrieve, along with being bundled with for instance a large ERP package.

myvoiceismypprt 3y ago

[dead]

Perenti 3y ago

No mention of the DecSystem-10 or 20. I loved TOPS-20. How those machines ran so well with so many users and so little ram is a lesson in efficiency.

rbanffy 3y ago

Also DLT, which was sold to Quantum and beget LTO, which is what stores our civilization's data if we need to do serious disaster recovery (as in when all stand-by replicas die at the same time and we need to restore it from off-site tapes).