Reply to post: Re: Well they want to stay relevant

SQL Server 2017's first rc lands and – yes! – it runs on Linux

Loud Speaker

Re: Well they want to stay relevant

I accept that it took a bit more than a year or two to pan out fully, but

I am not talking about home users - that was a whole generation later, as you say, and a second round of revolution.

In 1976, I was building both DEC and Intel systems - and maintaining software on PDP11's in a well known London software house. (And learning Unix).

I cannot state the exact year, but when we knew there was going to be an IBM PC, almost the entire company was told not to start any new project, as, regardless of what is was performance wise, it was going to be IBM and a PC. And in those days, no one was every fired for buying IBM.

We sat doing not much for almost a year before it was released. (Actually, I was using 8080's to replace PDP11/10s as comms multiplexors for a French client).

Psychologically, the PC was a "Business Machine" and not a toy - to the PHB. And its the PHBs that control the money. The users I am talking about were medium sized businesses, not home users.

The day we got the specs, everyone in the company who could write code was porting our business software from the PDP11 and/or ICL mainframe to it. Whatever it cost, it was way less than a PDP11/60 - which one of our customers bought for more than my mum paid for a 5 bedroom house in Islington. Companies with a staff of under 20 could run their own payroll on a machine that cost less than a contract to run it on someone else's ICL1900 and still have the machine to do other things for the rest of the week.

DEC could have gone in hard, much earlier than they did, and with more vigour. They did not. A single board PDP8 would have been cheaper than PC when the PC came out - if DEC had decided to go that way. The PDP8 is way simpler than the 8088 (I think it has less transistors than an 8080), and there was a ton of DECUS software fully debugged - what was there on the original PC? People around me were proposing a single chip PDP8 in 1972 - before the 8008 was even released. As an embedded processor, the PDP8 would have been viable in situations where the 8008 was not - mainly because of the vast amount of well tried software. (I was in a team which decided not to use an 8008 in 1974).

I admit the VMS vs Unix battle was a much later round of the same battle - roughly the mid 80's as you say. It was not til the 486 that Intel had a proper MMU that could run a proper OS. At that time, there was no other established OS that could have been (a) ported to the 486, and (b) was widely used in Industry. DOS was not exactly great! And PC hardware crashed daily - hourly for the cheaper machines.

However, this was also a time when the market expanded by a factor of 1,000 - for a second time.

Yes I knew about the Rainbow - and the Heathkit PDP11 - I could not afford them either.

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