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 "This is a great book" - Monica Helms "Brave and Important" - Laura L. Engel       Available on Amazon and bn.com!

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