[COFF] Re: What Happened to Interdata?

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@lemis.com>]

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On Wednesday, 26 July 2023 at 10:38:04 -0400, Paul Winalski wrote:
> On 7/25/23, segaloco via COFF <coff@tuhs.org> wrote:
>> Were Interdata machines
>> problematic in some sort of way, or was it merely fate, with more popular
>> minis from DEC simply spacing them out of the market?
>
> I suspect that Interdata had the same problem with their S/360
> lookalikes that RCA did with theirs.  If your business model is to
> provide a cheaper hardware alternative to IBM, your machine has to run
> IBM software, particularly the OS.

That's not the way I remember it.  RCA (and UNIVAC with them) and
Interdata had instruction sets that were close to the IBM instruction
set, but my recollection was that they were different enough that IBM
software wouldn't run on them.  That's a different situation from
Amdahl, which was almost completely compatible.

But that was a few years ago now, and I have forgotten the details.
Does anybody know for sure whether they could run IBM software?  I
know from my time at UNIVAC that the 9000 series had their own
operating systems.

Greg
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