3 ms·

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

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.

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.