From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: clemc@ccc.com (Clem cole) Date: Sun, 24 Jan 2016 21:14:43 -0500 Subject: [TUHS] PDP-11 questions In-Reply-To: References: <1453675247.12547.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> Message-ID: <22770A9B-7F5D-4FE4-8667-78D326239901@ccc.com> UNIX was cheap (free with a$100 tape coping fee) but processors were not as discounted as much as you might think. Yes there was a university price sheet but DEC was still making 45% gross margins on them. And DEC was no different than its competitors Sent from my iPhone > On Jan 24, 2016, at 8:55 PM, David Ritchie wrote: > > But wasn't a big part of the reason that DEC was successful in academia that PDP's were pretty heavily discounted vs. commercial pricing for similar compute power? Likewise with pricing for Unix? > > David Ritchie > > Sent from my iPhone > >> On Jan 24, 2016, at 17:40, Norman Wilson wrote: >> >> Noel Chiappa: >> >> I'd lay good money that the vast majority of PDP-11's never ran Unix. And >> UNIX might have happened on some other machine - it's not crucially tied to >> the PDP-11 - in fact, the ease with which it could be used on other machines >> was a huge part of its eventual success. >> >> ======= >> >> I have to disagree in part: the PDP-11 is a big part of >> what made UNIX so widespread, especially in university >> departments, in the latter part of the 1970s. >> >> That wasn't due so much to the PDP-11's technical details >> as to its pricing. The PDP-11 was a big sales success >> because it was such a powerful machine, with a price that >> individual departments could afford. Without a platform >> like that, I don't think UNIX would have spread nearly the >> way it did, even before it began to appear in a significant >> way on other architectures. Save for the VAX, which was >> really a PDP-11 in a gorilla suit, that didn't really happen >> until the early 1980s anyway, and I'm not convinced it >> would have happened had UNIX not already spread so much >> on the PDP-11. >> >> It worked both ways, of course. I too suspect that a >> majority (though I'm not so sure about `vast') of PDP-11s >> never ran UNIX. But I also suspect that a vast majority >> of those that did might not have been purchased without >> UNIX as a magnet. I don't think those who weren't >> around in the latter 1970s and early 1980s can appreciate >> the ways in which UNIX captured many programmers and >> sysadmins (the two were not so distinct back then!) as >> no other competing system could. It felt enormously >> more efficient and more pleasant to work on and with >> UNIX than with any of the competition, whether from DEC >> or elsewhere. At the very least, none of the other >> system vendors had anything to match UNIX; and by the >> same token, had UNIX not been there, other hardware >> vendors' systems would have had better sales. >> >> Sometime around 1981, the university department I worked >> at, which already had a VAX-11/780 and a PDP-11/45 running >> UNIX, wanted to get another system. Data General tried >> very hard to convince us to buy their VAX-competitor. >> I remember our visiting their local office to run some >> FORTRAN benchmarks. The code needed some tweaking to >> work under their OS, which DG claimed was better than >> UNIX. Us UNIX people had trouble restraining our chuckles >> as we watched the DG guys, who I truly believe were experts >> in their own OS, taking 15 or 20 minutes to do things that >> would have taken two or three with a few shell loops and >> ed commands. >> >> DG did not get the sale. We bought a second-hand VAX. >> Blame UNIX. >> >> Norman Wilson >> Toronto ON