From: Mary Ann Horton <mah@mhorton.net>
To: tuhs@tuhs.org
Subject: [TUHS] Re: Reaction to the 3B2 at Bell Labs
Date: Tue, 29 Nov 2022 18:50:14 -0800 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <29be0075-e06e-0db9-1537-b8939fa019ed@mhorton.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <8f278bf8-de57-4e77-a3b8-d007d7c3a446@app.fastmail.com>
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You asked for the reaction of people in Bell Labs. I've seen reaction
from Research, but there was also the Development part of the labs.
I was in Columbus with a lot of OSS projects. Ours (Medis) was typical
in our reaction.
The 3B20 Duplex was designed for Telco central offices. It ran on 48V
and had Delco car batteries as a UPS. That was fine for the telcos.
The 3B20 Simplex was a less fault tolerant version, intended to compete
with the Vax 11/780. Nobody wanted it.
The 3B15 was chest freezer size, cheaper, to compete with the Vax
11/750. Nobody wanted it.
The 3B2 in its various sizes was a desktop micro, intended to compete
with a Sun server. It had possibilities. It had Datakit, and later
TCP/IP. You could connect a Blit to it, and later the 5620. We were told
to use it. "Eat your own dog food." None of us liked it, but we made do.
I was delighted when I transferred to the computer center and got to
order Suns for desktop use. We still ordered 3B2s for our "att" email
gateways.
Incidently, I won a 3B1 in a raffle in 1986. That was a different beast,
68K based, the UNIX PC built by Convergent. I used it for Stargate and
the UUCP Zone. It had a GUI but the screen and resolution were too small
to really be useful. I still have one in my garage.
Thanks,
/Mary Ann Horton/ (she/her/ma'am)
maryannhorton.com <https://maryannhorton.com>
"This is a great book" - Monica Helms
"Brave and Important" - Laura L. Engel
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On 11/26/22 10:46, Seth Morabito wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I'm giving a presentation on the AT&T 3B2 at a local makerspace next month, and while I've been preparing the talk I became curious about an aspect that I don't know has been discussed elsewhere.
>
> I'm well aware that the 3B2 was something of a market failure with not much penetration into the wider commercial UNIX space, but I'm very curious to know more about what the reaction was at Bell Labs. When AT&T entered the computer hardware market after the 1984 breakup, I get the impression that there wasn't very much interest in any of it at Bell Labs, is that true?
>
> Can anyone recall what the general mood was regarding the 3B2 (and the 7300 and the 6300, I suppose!)
>
> -Seth
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prev parent reply other threads:[~2022-11-30 2:52 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 32+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2022-11-26 18:46 [TUHS] " Seth Morabito
2022-11-26 19:18 ` [TUHS] " Larry McVoy
2022-11-26 20:04 ` Seth Morabito
2022-11-26 20:42 ` Rob Pike
2022-11-26 21:46 ` Clem Cole
2022-11-26 23:00 ` Marc Donner
2022-11-26 23:23 ` Larry McVoy
2022-11-26 23:47 ` Dan Cross
2022-11-27 0:17 ` Larry McVoy
2022-11-27 4:43 ` Phil Budne
2022-11-27 14:51 ` John P. Linderman
2022-11-27 15:29 ` arnold
2022-11-27 16:11 ` Ron Natalie
2022-11-27 16:59 ` Warner Losh
2022-11-27 18:59 ` arnold
2022-11-27 20:45 ` Rob Pike
2022-11-28 18:53 ` William Corcoran
2022-11-28 20:59 ` Kenneth Goodwin
2022-11-28 22:33 ` ron minnich
2022-11-28 22:43 ` Marc Donner
2022-11-29 1:49 ` Alan Glasser
2022-12-01 6:10 ` Kevin Bowling
2022-12-01 8:30 ` Andrew Hume
2022-12-01 8:53 ` arnold
2022-12-01 9:19 ` Skip Tavakkolian
2022-12-01 12:25 ` Brad Spencer
2022-12-01 10:00 ` Andrew Hume
2022-12-01 10:17 ` arnold
2022-11-27 14:53 ` Larry McVoy
2022-11-26 19:21 ` Douglas McIlroy
2022-11-29 11:33 ` alan
2022-11-30 2:50 ` Mary Ann Horton [this message]
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