[TUHS] Reaction to the 3B2 at Bell Labs

[TUHS] Reaction to the 3B2 at Bell Labs

[Seth Morabito]

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
-- 
  Seth Morabito
  Poulsbo, WA
  web@loomcom.com

[TUHS] Re: Reaction to the 3B2 at Bell Labs

[Larry McVoy]

On Sat, Nov 26, 2022 at 10:46:33AM -0800, Seth Morabito wrote:
> Can anyone recall what the general mood was regarding the 3B2 (and the 7300 and the 6300, I suppose!)

If the 7300 was the 3B1, M68K, I had one of those and a good friend also
had one.  It was a huge step up from a CP/M machine which was my 
previous machine.  I liked it a lot.

But I wasn't at Bell Labs so perhaps this isn't the info you want.  I got
the sense that the 3B2 was not very popular anywhere.

[TUHS] Re: Reaction to the 3B2 at Bell Labs

[Douglas McIlroy]

All I can say is that the only 3B2 I can remember was in the Living
Computer Museum in Seattle.

Doug

On Sat, Nov 26, 2022 at 1:47 PM Seth Morabito <web@loomcom.com> 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
> --
>   Seth Morabito
>   Poulsbo, WA
>   web@loomcom.com

[TUHS] Re: Reaction to the 3B2 at Bell Labs

[Seth Morabito]

On Sat, Nov 26, 2022, at 11:18 AM, Larry McVoy wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 26, 2022 at 10:46:33AM -0800, Seth Morabito wrote:
>> Can anyone recall what the general mood was regarding the 3B2 (and the 7300 and the 6300, I suppose!)
>
> If the 7300 was the 3B1, M68K, I had one of those and a good friend also
> had one.  It was a huge step up from a CP/M machine which was my 
> previous machine.  I liked it a lot.
>
> But I wasn't at Bell Labs so perhaps this isn't the info you want.  I got
> the sense that the 3B2 was not very popular anywhere.

It was definitely a weird beast. I'm only "fond" of it in the loosest possible sense because I spent so much time trying to understand its internals. It was the perfect combination of too slow, too low specs, and too expensive!

I think one of my slides will simply say "IT WAS BAD AT BEING A COMPUTER"

-Seth
-- 
  Seth Morabito
  Poulsbo, WA
  web@loomcom.com

[TUHS] Re: Reaction to the 3B2 at Bell Labs

[Rob Pike]

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It was not popular with CS Research, and we were not popular with them. We
were using VAXes, which the 3B series were attempting to compete against.
The VAX was not exactly graceful, architecturally, but the 3B series was
clumsier and less cost-effective. We weren't interested, despite frequently
applied pressure.

And, although a different topic, there was the way the commercialization of
the Blit forced the 68000 to be replaced by the BELLMAC-32 by essentially
the same people, or at least the same boss (Scanlon), which was a poor
decision on every dimension. The idea was to get BELLMACs out there to
drive up production, but the chip was far less suitable, and each one cost
about what a full Blit with a 68000 instead would have. A loss leader, bad
financially and bad technically.

On the other hand, as I resullt of I did port an OS and other software to
the BELLMAC-32 as a result of this work, and learned how badly it did
things like memory management and the interrupt vector setup, and how buggy
it was.

So there were not many warm feelings between 1127 and the computer division.

-rob


On Sun, Nov 27, 2022 at 7:05 AM Seth Morabito <web@loomcom.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Nov 26, 2022, at 11:18 AM, Larry McVoy wrote:
> > On Sat, Nov 26, 2022 at 10:46:33AM -0800, Seth Morabito wrote:
> >> Can anyone recall what the general mood was regarding the 3B2 (and the
> 7300 and the 6300, I suppose!)
> >
> > If the 7300 was the 3B1, M68K, I had one of those and a good friend also
> > had one.  It was a huge step up from a CP/M machine which was my
> > previous machine.  I liked it a lot.
> >
> > But I wasn't at Bell Labs so perhaps this isn't the info you want.  I got
> > the sense that the 3B2 was not very popular anywhere.
>
> It was definitely a weird beast. I'm only "fond" of it in the loosest
> possible sense because I spent so much time trying to understand its
> internals. It was the perfect combination of too slow, too low specs, and
> too expensive!
>
> I think one of my slides will simply say "IT WAS BAD AT BEING A COMPUTER"
>
> -Seth
> --
>   Seth Morabito
>   Poulsbo, WA
>   web@loomcom.com
>

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[TUHS] Re: Reaction to the 3B2 at Bell Labs

[Clem Cole]

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Seth, I've often said the only reason they sold any of them was that AT&T
required you to buy one as the reference system for SVR3 - so anyone that
wanted to port it tended to buy one 3B2 just to have it as the reference
box.

Rob's comment about the BELLMAC-32 was interesting.  I could never quite
understand why AT&T wanted to create its own microprocessor and associated
ISA and try to sell it against the other merchant microprocessors (just as
I never could understand why HP and IBM did either - but they were already
formally in the computer business).   Selling chips to other people to use
for their designs is a difficult business that needs a sophisticated sales
and marketing team.   Even if AT&T could create a technically
competitive device and get the manufacturing cost structure in line
with Moto or Intel so that the street price could be competitive, the
previous sales and marketing scheme of abandoning UNIX on your doorstep was
not going to work, and it was having a new technical sales support team to
match Intel and Moto was just not going to happen any time soon.

Supporting the operating companies is a different beast than supporting,
say, a start-up trying to build a hot new device -> that company's
product.   While I suspect Rob and Bart built their own tools for the
redox of the Blit, Rob I ask you -- truly if you have been outside of AT&T,
could you imagine trying to use that device? I can't.

I've told the details of the story elsewhere, and they don't really matter
here. But I remember being at Masscomp and finding a bug in the new FP chip
for the 68020 - which was causing a 'stop shop' on our newest product -
when one of the factory exercisers/diags started to fail.   We were paying
a premium at the time and Moto's local folks did not want to listen at
first.  Our head of HW came to me because he knew that I knew a bit about
the application program they were using as a test from my grad school
days.   With the end help of the Fortran compiler back-end guys in a few
hours of debugging, I was able to isolate the chip failure.  Then I wrote a
new 10-line Fortran example and associated assembler code, which we faxed
to Moto.  Moto had a 'Technical Consulting Engineer' on the line from
Austin, and indeed it was validated as a problem, and less than 12 hrs
later their team had figured out what was going on in the chip.

I bring this up because I just don't see AT&T has been able to react that
way, although, in the end, we had to solve it once Moto figure out what the
cause of the error was (a slow charge circuit was wiping out the exponent
in R/R instructions under certain conditions - so we changed the compiler
not generate the sequence so we should still ship).
ᐧ

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[TUHS] Re: Reaction to the 3B2 at Bell Labs

[Marc Donner]

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My chronology may be borked, but what I remember from that era is that IBM
was selling the AS/400 very effectively against the VAX by then and was
vacuuming up the market.  The problem was that DEC's theory of sales was to
have engineers sell to engineers, while IBM sold basement servers to chain
stores.  The chains bought these things by the bushel basket.  The HW and
OS were both weird (as seen by the computer scientists at Watson) but
remarkably reliable.  As near as I can tell, this was what ultimately put
DEC under ... I think the 3B2 was collateral damage ... I presume that AT&T
did not really have time to learn how to sell machines to the commercial
market, particularly to the folks who were buying them in numbers ending in
,000.

What I learned while watching from the sidelines is that I (and by
extension everyone on this list) was not the target audience.
=====
nygeek.net
mindthegapdialogs.com/home <https://www.mindthegapdialogs.com/home>


On Sat, Nov 26, 2022 at 4:48 PM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

> Seth, I've often said the only reason they sold any of them was that AT&T
> required you to buy one as the reference system for SVR3 - so anyone that
> wanted to port it tended to buy one 3B2 just to have it as the reference
> box.
>
> Rob's comment about the BELLMAC-32 was interesting.  I could never quite
> understand why AT&T wanted to create its own microprocessor and associated
> ISA and try to sell it against the other merchant microprocessors (just as
> I never could understand why HP and IBM did either - but they were already
> formally in the computer business).   Selling chips to other people to use
> for their designs is a difficult business that needs a sophisticated sales
> and marketing team.   Even if AT&T could create a technically
> competitive device and get the manufacturing cost structure in line
> with Moto or Intel so that the street price could be competitive, the
> previous sales and marketing scheme of abandoning UNIX on your doorstep was
> not going to work, and it was having a new technical sales support team to
> match Intel and Moto was just not going to happen any time soon.
>
> Supporting the operating companies is a different beast than supporting,
> say, a start-up trying to build a hot new device -> that company's
> product.   While I suspect Rob and Bart built their own tools for the
> redox of the Blit, Rob I ask you -- truly if you have been outside of AT&T,
> could you imagine trying to use that device? I can't.
>
> I've told the details of the story elsewhere, and they don't really matter
> here. But I remember being at Masscomp and finding a bug in the new FP chip
> for the 68020 - which was causing a 'stop shop' on our newest product -
> when one of the factory exercisers/diags started to fail.   We were paying
> a premium at the time and Moto's local folks did not want to listen at
> first.  Our head of HW came to me because he knew that I knew a bit about
> the application program they were using as a test from my grad school
> days.   With the end help of the Fortran compiler back-end guys in a few
> hours of debugging, I was able to isolate the chip failure.  Then I wrote a
> new 10-line Fortran example and associated assembler code, which we faxed
> to Moto.  Moto had a 'Technical Consulting Engineer' on the line from
> Austin, and indeed it was validated as a problem, and less than 12 hrs
> later their team had figured out what was going on in the chip.
>
> I bring this up because I just don't see AT&T has been able to react that
> way, although, in the end, we had to solve it once Moto figure out what the
> cause of the error was (a slow charge circuit was wiping out the exponent
> in R/R instructions under certain conditions - so we changed the compiler
> not generate the sequence so we should still ship).
> ᐧ
>

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[TUHS] Re: Reaction to the 3B2 at Bell Labs

[Larry McVoy]

On Sat, Nov 26, 2022 at 06:00:38PM -0500, Marc Donner wrote:
> remarkably reliable.  As near as I can tell, this was what ultimately put
> DEC under ... 

Sun Microsystems has entered the chat...  They very much competed with
DEC and ate their lunch.

[TUHS] Re: Reaction to the 3B2 at Bell Labs

[Dan Cross]

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On Sat, Nov 26, 2022, 6:23 PM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Nov 26, 2022 at 06:00:38PM -0500, Marc Donner wrote:
> > remarkably reliable.  As near as I can tell, this was what ultimately put
> > DEC under ...
>
> Sun Microsystems has entered the chat...  They very much competed with
> DEC and ate their lunch.
>

I think ultimately DEC ate DEC's own lunch. They bet on re VAX 9000 and
that wasn't a wise gamble.

        - Dan C.

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[TUHS] Re: Reaction to the 3B2 at Bell Labs

[Larry McVoy]

On Sat, Nov 26, 2022 at 06:47:52PM -0500, Dan Cross wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 26, 2022, 6:23 PM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
> > On Sat, Nov 26, 2022 at 06:00:38PM -0500, Marc Donner wrote:
> > > remarkably reliable.  As near as I can tell, this was what ultimately put
> > > DEC under ...
> >
> > Sun Microsystems has entered the chat...  They very much competed with
> > DEC and ate their lunch.
> >
> 
> I think ultimately DEC ate DEC's own lunch. They bet on re VAX 9000 and
> that wasn't a wise gamble.

I read the Wikipedia page on the 9000.  It's sad that the 9000 wasn't 
cancelled when they had better alternatives.

It reminds me of a CPU I got cancelled at SGI.  It was in the mid
1990's and the project was code named "Beast".  It could do tons of
data movement, to make that happen, the packaging had pin recepters
on all sides, top, bottom, and all 4 sides.  The packaging, at volume,
was going to cost $1,200 each.  No CPU, just the packaging.

On top of that, SGI did a flip/flop design cycle, flip focussed on
integer performance, databases, while flop focussed on floating point
and catered to the super computing market.

This was when almost all of the processor architects were talking to me
because I had written LMbench which was a set of microbenchmarks that
measured bandwidth and latency of everything.  The architects loved them
because they were small and could be run on a simulator.

So I had a pretty good idea what Sun was coming up with (I had left Sun
for SGI), knew what Intel was doing, HP yep, DEC less so but had some
idea about the Alpha roadmap, IBM was the one place that I didn't have
good intel.

I looked at what Beast was claiming, looked at the past predictions
of MIPS chips and when they shipped vs when they would claim to ship,
and looked at the exploding internet / database market and gulped.
Beast was the wrong answer and we were gonna get crushed.

I started shopping my theory around, eventually got a meeting with
Wei Yen (who was someone high enough up).  I went over all the info
I had, Wei Yen was super impressed and asked me if this was my job
and I said "oh, no, this is just a hobby I play around with" and he
replied "Keep playing, you play nicely" and went off and cancelled
Beast.

DEC needed someone with that sort of data.  I had actual performance
results from every processor in the mainstream and they were no
bullshit results, anyone could reproduce them.  Then I had some idea
of almost everyone's roadmap.  Without the data, they would have 
wasted a ton of money on Beast.

In the end, it didn't really matter, x86 killed SGI just like Sun
and IBM killed DEC.  And x86 killed Sun as well.
-- 
---
Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat

[TUHS] Re: Reaction to the 3B2 at Bell Labs

[Phil Budne]

Larry McVoy wrote:
> I read the Wikipedia page on the 9000.  It's sad that the 9000
> wasn't cancelled when they had better alternatives.

In an oral history Bob Supnik described Ken Olsen couldn't get his
head around the fact that the NVAX chip could equal the 9000:

@2:59:45 in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3tcCBHRIfU

In part 2, Bob described how then DEC VP Gordon Bell having earlier
predicted when the microprocessor performance curve would cross over
minis and mainframes:

@1:51:45 in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3tcCBHRIfU

He also talks about how the company couldn't command the bsame gross
margins as it did in the VAX era.

[TUHS] Re: Reaction to the 3B2 at Bell Labs

[John P. Linderman]

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We were "gifted" a 3B2, as in "take this and use it!". I ran a "ps" command
in single user mode, and it took 20 seconds to run.
Our machine names were themed around bird names, so we christened the 3B2
"junco". Our director said we had to get along,
so we renamed it "jay". But everyone knew what the J stood for. The 3B2
served as a doorstop.

On Sat, Nov 26, 2022 at 11:44 PM Phil Budne <phil@ultimate.com> wrote:

> Larry McVoy wrote:
> > I read the Wikipedia page on the 9000.  It's sad that the 9000
> > wasn't cancelled when they had better alternatives.
>
> In an oral history Bob Supnik described Ken Olsen couldn't get his
> head around the fact that the NVAX chip could equal the 9000:
>
> @2:59:45 in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3tcCBHRIfU
>
> In part 2, Bob described how then DEC VP Gordon Bell having earlier
> predicted when the microprocessor performance curve would cross over
> minis and mainframes:
>
> @1:51:45 in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3tcCBHRIfU
>
> He also talks about how the company couldn't command the bsame gross
> margins as it did in the VAX era.
>

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[TUHS] Re: Reaction to the 3B2 at Bell Labs

[Larry McVoy]

On Sat, Nov 26, 2022 at 11:43:50PM -0500, Phil Budne wrote:
> Larry McVoy wrote:
> > I read the Wikipedia page on the 9000.  It's sad that the 9000
> > wasn't cancelled when they had better alternatives.
> 
> In an oral history Bob Supnik described Ken Olsen couldn't get his
> head around the fact that the NVAX chip could equal the 9000:
> 
> @2:59:45 in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3tcCBHRIfU
> 
> In part 2, Bob described how then DEC VP Gordon Bell having earlier
> predicted when the microprocessor performance curve would cross over
> minis and mainframes:
> 
> @1:51:45 in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3tcCBHRIfU
> 
> He also talks about how the company couldn't command the bsame gross
> margins as it did in the VAX era.

Hence the need for hard reproducible data.  I'm sure I would have suffered
the same fate at SGI if I had no data.
-- 
---
Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat

[TUHS] Re: Reaction to the 3B2 at Bell Labs

[arnold]

Many schools were similarly gifted; I had them both at Georgia Tech and
at Emory.  They didn't see a lot of real use. The one more-or-less cool
thing they had was a soft power switch; pushing it started an orderly Unix
shutdown (usually).  Once in a while one had to yank the cord from the
wall to shut it down.

Arnold

"John P. Linderman" <jpl.jpl@gmail.com> wrote:

> We were "gifted" a 3B2, as in "take this and use it!". I ran a "ps" command
> in single user mode, and it took 20 seconds to run.
> Our machine names were themed around bird names, so we christened the 3B2
> "junco". Our director said we had to get along,
> so we renamed it "jay". But everyone knew what the J stood for. The 3B2
> served as a doorstop.
>
> On Sat, Nov 26, 2022 at 11:44 PM Phil Budne <phil@ultimate.com> wrote:
>
> > Larry McVoy wrote:
> > > I read the Wikipedia page on the 9000.  It's sad that the 9000
> > > wasn't cancelled when they had better alternatives.
> >
> > In an oral history Bob Supnik described Ken Olsen couldn't get his
> > head around the fact that the NVAX chip could equal the 9000:
> >
> > @2:59:45 in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3tcCBHRIfU
> >
> > In part 2, Bob described how then DEC VP Gordon Bell having earlier
> > predicted when the microprocessor performance curve would cross over
> > minis and mainframes:
> >
> > @1:51:45 in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3tcCBHRIfU
> >
> > He also talks about how the company couldn't command the bsame gross
> > margins as it did in the VAX era.
> >

[TUHS] Re: Reaction to the 3B2 at Bell Labs

[Ron Natalie]

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>. But everyone knew what the J stood for. The 3B2 served as a doorstop.

Shades of the jerq terminal.    The J prefix persiste in the code long 
after the nickname was quashed.


Being in charge of the Rutgers computer center, we were gifted a lot of 
ATT hardware.   We had one 3B20 (now that was a pure piece of phone 
equipment, you shut it down by turning a switch inside and holding the 
button down until it twanged.   Just like putting an old 303 modem into 
loop back).   We also got three 3B5's (noted for the one installed in 
the New Brunswick computing room that got completely drenched when a 
pipe burst and kept on running) and countless of the 3B2s.    I chortled 
in that unless you were logged in as root, you couldn't work the power 
switch.    Yanking the cord out of the wall was still and option.

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[TUHS] Re: Reaction to the 3B2 at Bell Labs

[Warner Losh]

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On Sun, Nov 27, 2022, 9:11 AM Ron Natalie <ron@ronnatalie.com> wrote:

>
> . But everyone knew what the J stood for. The 3B2 served as a doorstop.
>
>
> Shades of the jerq terminal.    The J prefix persiste in the code long
> after the nickname was quashed.
>
>
> Being in charge of the Rutgers computer center, we were gifted a lot of
> ATT hardware.   We had one 3B20 (now that was a pure piece of phone
> equipment, you shut it down by turning a switch inside and holding the
> button down until it twanged.   Just like putting an old 303 modem into
> loop back).   We also got three 3B5's (noted for the one installed in the
> New Brunswick computing room that got completely drenched when a pipe burst
> and kept on running) and countless of the 3B2s.    I chortled in that
> unless you were logged in as root, you couldn't work the power switch.
>  Yanking the cord out of the wall was still and option.
>


When I worked for The Wollongong Group, we had a 3b2, 3b5 and 3b20 for all
the networking products we had. The 3b20 was nice. The 3b5 wasn't
terrible.... the 3b2 was the only machine I've seen that I could visibly
see the characters appear one at a time over the telnet session for some,
but not all, programs. Those programs, iirc, used stdio, but the stdio on
the 3b2 didn't have buffering turned on...

Warner

>

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[TUHS] Re: Reaction to the 3B2 at Bell Labs

[arnold]

Georgia Tech got two 3B20s.  They did very little more than consume
electricity and look impressive.  I wanted to port 4.2BSD to them,
but that never got off the ground.

"Ron Natalie" <ron@ronnatalie.com> wrote:

>
> >. But everyone knew what the J stood for. The 3B2 served as a doorstop.
>
> Shades of the jerq terminal.    The J prefix persiste in the code long 
> after the nickname was quashed.
>
>
> Being in charge of the Rutgers computer center, we were gifted a lot of 
> ATT hardware.   We had one 3B20 (now that was a pure piece of phone 
> equipment, you shut it down by turning a switch inside and holding the 
> button down until it twanged.   Just like putting an old 303 modem into 
> loop back).   We also got three 3B5's (noted for the one installed in 
> the New Brunswick computing room that got completely drenched when a 
> pipe burst and kept on running) and countless of the 3B2s.    I chortled 
> in that unless you were logged in as root, you couldn't work the power 
> switch.    Yanking the cord out of the wall was still and option.

[TUHS] Re: Reaction to the 3B2 at Bell Labs

[Rob Pike]

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But to shut down the dual 3B20 used in switching, you pulled long copper
rod, about 3cm in diameter, from a receptacle between the two machines. It
was attached with a braided conductor to the frame. And then you slid the
rod into another receptacle to short out the power supply for certain.

-rob


On Mon, Nov 28, 2022 at 5:59 AM <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:

> Georgia Tech got two 3B20s.  They did very little more than consume
> electricity and look impressive.  I wanted to port 4.2BSD to them,
> but that never got off the ground.
>
> "Ron Natalie" <ron@ronnatalie.com> wrote:
>
> >
> > >. But everyone knew what the J stood for. The 3B2 served as a doorstop.
> >
> > Shades of the jerq terminal.    The J prefix persiste in the code long
> > after the nickname was quashed.
> >
> >
> > Being in charge of the Rutgers computer center, we were gifted a lot of
> > ATT hardware.   We had one 3B20 (now that was a pure piece of phone
> > equipment, you shut it down by turning a switch inside and holding the
> > button down until it twanged.   Just like putting an old 303 modem into
> > loop back).   We also got three 3B5's (noted for the one installed in
> > the New Brunswick computing room that got completely drenched when a
> > pipe burst and kept on running) and countless of the 3B2s.    I chortled
> > in that unless you were logged in as root, you couldn't work the power
> > switch.    Yanking the cord out of the wall was still and option.
>

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[TUHS] Re: Reaction to the 3B2 at Bell Labs

[William Corcoran]

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I have a 3b2/300.  Anytime you run a command that is compute bound, like factoring a large prime number, the CPU buzzes!



Bill Corcoran



On Nov 27, 2022, at 9:52 AM, John P. Linderman <jpl.jpl@gmail.com> wrote:


[EXTERNAL]

We were "gifted" a 3B2, as in "take this and use it!". I ran a "ps" command in single user mode, and it took 20 seconds to run.
Our machine names were themed around bird names, so we christened the 3B2 "junco". Our director said we had to get along,
so we renamed it "jay". But everyone knew what the J stood for. The 3B2 served as a doorstop.

On Sat, Nov 26, 2022 at 11:44 PM Phil Budne <phil@ultimate.com<mailto:phil@ultimate.com>> wrote:
Larry McVoy wrote:
> I read the Wikipedia page on the 9000.  It's sad that the 9000
> wasn't cancelled when they had better alternatives.

In an oral history Bob Supnik described Ken Olsen couldn't get his
head around the fact that the NVAX chip could equal the 9000:

@2:59:45 in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3tcCBHRIfU

In part 2, Bob described how then DEC VP Gordon Bell having earlier
predicted when the microprocessor performance curve would cross over
minis and mainframes:

@1:51:45 in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3tcCBHRIfU

He also talks about how the company couldn't command the bsame gross
margins as it did in the VAX era.


THIS IS AN EXTERNAL EMAIL -- This email was sent from someone OUTSIDE of the NSM Insurance Group email system. PLEASE USE CAUTION WHEN REVIEWING THIS EMAIL.

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[TUHS] Re: Reaction to the 3B2 at Bell Labs

[Kenneth Goodwin]

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That must be the 300 B superhive model CPU

On Mon, Nov 28, 2022, 1:54 PM William Corcoran <wlc@jctaylor.com> wrote:

> I have a 3b2/300.  Anytime you run a command that is compute bound, like
> factoring a large prime number, the CPU buzzes!
>
>
>
> Bill Corcoran
>
>
>
>
>
> On Nov 27, 2022, at 9:52 AM, John P. Linderman <jpl.jpl@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 
>
> [EXTERNAL]
>
>
> We were "gifted" a 3B2, as in "take this and use it!". I ran a "ps"
> command in single user mode, and it took 20 seconds to run.
> Our machine names were themed around bird names, so we christened the 3B2
> "junco". Our director said we had to get along,
> so we renamed it "jay". But everyone knew what the J stood for. The 3B2
> served as a doorstop.
>
> On Sat, Nov 26, 2022 at 11:44 PM Phil Budne <phil@ultimate.com> wrote:
>
>> Larry McVoy wrote:
>> > I read the Wikipedia page on the 9000.  It's sad that the 9000
>> > wasn't cancelled when they had better alternatives.
>>
>> In an oral history Bob Supnik described Ken Olsen couldn't get his
>> head around the fact that the NVAX chip could equal the 9000:
>>
>> @2:59:45 in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3tcCBHRIfU
>>
>> In part 2, Bob described how then DEC VP Gordon Bell having earlier
>> predicted when the microprocessor performance curve would cross over
>> minis and mainframes:
>>
>> @1:51:45 in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3tcCBHRIfU
>>
>> He also talks about how the company couldn't command the bsame gross
>> margins as it did in the VAX era.
>>
>
>
> THIS IS AN EXTERNAL EMAIL -- This email was sent from someone OUTSIDE of
> the NSM Insurance Group email system. PLEASE USE CAUTION WHEN REVIEWING
> THIS EMAIL.
>
>

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[TUHS] Re: Reaction to the 3B2 at Bell Labs

[ron minnich]

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I was visiting Holmdel in 1981, and there was a tradeshow for the BellMAC
CPUs there, filling ground floor of the central atrium. There was some
swag, which I had for a few years, including refrigerator magnets. The one
I remember:
"Don't be alone, call MACphone!"

I remember reading an article in the early 80s pointing out that, due to
the scale of the Bell System, the center of the universe of semiconductor
fabrication at that time was ... Allentown, PA. Western Electric had an ad,
along the lines of, "who will create the 256 Kb memory part? WE will" -- WE
as in Western Electric.Those parts would have been fabbed in Allentown
IIRC.

 It is a bit hard to recall, much less believe. but PA, land of dead still
mills, the Molly Maguires, and underground coal mine fires that will burn
for centuries, also had silicon.




On Mon, Nov 28, 2022 at 1:01 PM Kenneth Goodwin <kennethgoodwin56@gmail.com>
wrote:

> That must be the 300 B superhive model CPU
>
> On Mon, Nov 28, 2022, 1:54 PM William Corcoran <wlc@jctaylor.com> wrote:
>
>> I have a 3b2/300.  Anytime you run a command that is compute bound, like
>> factoring a large prime number, the CPU buzzes!
>>
>>
>>
>> Bill Corcoran
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Nov 27, 2022, at 9:52 AM, John P. Linderman <jpl.jpl@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> 
>>
>> [EXTERNAL]
>>
>>
>> We were "gifted" a 3B2, as in "take this and use it!". I ran a "ps"
>> command in single user mode, and it took 20 seconds to run.
>> Our machine names were themed around bird names, so we christened the 3B2
>> "junco". Our director said we had to get along,
>> so we renamed it "jay". But everyone knew what the J stood for. The 3B2
>> served as a doorstop.
>>
>> On Sat, Nov 26, 2022 at 11:44 PM Phil Budne <phil@ultimate.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Larry McVoy wrote:
>>> > I read the Wikipedia page on the 9000.  It's sad that the 9000
>>> > wasn't cancelled when they had better alternatives.
>>>
>>> In an oral history Bob Supnik described Ken Olsen couldn't get his
>>> head around the fact that the NVAX chip could equal the 9000:
>>>
>>> @2:59:45 in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3tcCBHRIfU
>>>
>>> In part 2, Bob described how then DEC VP Gordon Bell having earlier
>>> predicted when the microprocessor performance curve would cross over
>>> minis and mainframes:
>>>
>>> @1:51:45 in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3tcCBHRIfU
>>>
>>> He also talks about how the company couldn't command the bsame gross
>>> margins as it did in the VAX era.
>>>
>>
>>
>> THIS IS AN EXTERNAL EMAIL -- This email was sent from someone OUTSIDE of
>> the NSM Insurance Group email system. PLEASE USE CAUTION WHEN REVIEWING
>> THIS EMAIL.
>>
>>

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[TUHS] Re: Reaction to the 3B2 at Bell Labs

[Marc Donner]

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IBM built a major semiconductor fab up in Fishkill, NY.  About two hours
drive north of NYC.  At one point (mid-1980s) it was the biggest fab in the
world according to some metric.

On Mon, Nov 28, 2022, 17:35 ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote:

> I was visiting Holmdel in 1981, and there was a tradeshow for the BellMAC
> CPUs there, filling ground floor of the central atrium. There was some
> swag, which I had for a few years, including refrigerator magnets. The one
> I remember:
> "Don't be alone, call MACphone!"
>
> I remember reading an article in the early 80s pointing out that, due to
> the scale of the Bell System, the center of the universe of semiconductor
> fabrication at that time was ... Allentown, PA. Western Electric had an ad,
> along the lines of, "who will create the 256 Kb memory part? WE will" -- WE
> as in Western Electric.Those parts would have been fabbed in Allentown
> IIRC.
>
>  It is a bit hard to recall, much less believe. but PA, land of dead still
> mills, the Molly Maguires, and underground coal mine fires that will burn
> for centuries, also had silicon.
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, Nov 28, 2022 at 1:01 PM Kenneth Goodwin <
> kennethgoodwin56@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> That must be the 300 B superhive model CPU
>>
>> On Mon, Nov 28, 2022, 1:54 PM William Corcoran <wlc@jctaylor.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I have a 3b2/300.  Anytime you run a command that is compute bound, like
>>> factoring a large prime number, the CPU buzzes!
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Bill Corcoran
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Nov 27, 2022, at 9:52 AM, John P. Linderman <jpl.jpl@gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>> 
>>>
>>> [EXTERNAL]
>>>
>>>
>>> We were "gifted" a 3B2, as in "take this and use it!". I ran a "ps"
>>> command in single user mode, and it took 20 seconds to run.
>>> Our machine names were themed around bird names, so we christened the
>>> 3B2 "junco". Our director said we had to get along,
>>> so we renamed it "jay". But everyone knew what the J stood for. The 3B2
>>> served as a doorstop.
>>>
>>> On Sat, Nov 26, 2022 at 11:44 PM Phil Budne <phil@ultimate.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Larry McVoy wrote:
>>>> > I read the Wikipedia page on the 9000.  It's sad that the 9000
>>>> > wasn't cancelled when they had better alternatives.
>>>>
>>>> In an oral history Bob Supnik described Ken Olsen couldn't get his
>>>> head around the fact that the NVAX chip could equal the 9000:
>>>>
>>>> @2:59:45 in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3tcCBHRIfU
>>>>
>>>> In part 2, Bob described how then DEC VP Gordon Bell having earlier
>>>> predicted when the microprocessor performance curve would cross over
>>>> minis and mainframes:
>>>>
>>>> @1:51:45 in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3tcCBHRIfU
>>>>
>>>> He also talks about how the company couldn't command the bsame gross
>>>> margins as it did in the VAX era.
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> THIS IS AN EXTERNAL EMAIL -- This email was sent from someone OUTSIDE of
>>> the NSM Insurance Group email system. PLEASE USE CAUTION WHEN REVIEWING
>>> THIS EMAIL.
>>>
>>>

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[TUHS] Re: Reaction to the 3B2 at Bell Labs

[Alan Glasser]

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A few 3B2 stories...

In the late 1970's  there were no 3B2's (yet), but there was the MAC 8
processor.  The name "MAC 8" was problematic to me and my coworkers: it
stood for Microprocessor Advisory Committee.  It was a processor designed
by a committee!  It was slow and more problematically, it was not hardware
compatible with Intel 8080 support chips.  I don't remember all of the
details but it was an edge versus level set of problems.  It was fun to
program.  There was an evaluation box (called a MacTutor) that you
connected to an RS-232 line to connect it with a PDP-11 UNIX system for
cross-assembly/cross-compiling (the assembler language was as close to C as
an assembler language could get).  The MacTutor was a fun toy.  The MAC 8
in production hardware (at least in Holmdel) was a disaster.  See
https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_westernEleC8TUTORJul79_3968770/mode/2up

In the early 1980's, I was a Bell Labs technical supervisor in a number of
different development (in contrast to research) organizations. There was
considerable pressure on my management (and me) to utilize 3B2's instead of
DEC hardware; a little later (about 1986) there was pressure to use 6300's
and later 6386's (which ran UNIX).

My first experience with an original 3B2 (one without a model number) was
identical to that of John P Linderman's.  Compiling a modest C program took
forever.  A little later they gave that one a model number of 300 and came
out with a 400, which was almost reasonable and a 310 which, I believe, had
the same processor and clock as a 400 with less expansion slots. Later came
the 600 and 700, which were pretty reasonable and we used them for a number
of products (DEFINITY Manager 3 for administering a large PBX was one I
brought to market with my team).

In October, 1996 I was promoted to development department head of Global
Messaging Services (GMS) which was better known as AT&T Mail.  It was a
hectic time to be joining the organization as the job I took had been being
filled temporarily by another person (who was a friend of mine and, like
me, was new to the organization) and they were in the final throes of
development of a significant new release, about to go into system test (in
another department).  One of the first things I learned is that the service
ran on many 3b2/600's mostly in two locations in the US, but had many small
worldwide locations (Hong Kong, Tokyo, Sydney, Tel Aviv, London, Moscow,
and some others I don't remember) all connected by DataKit.  The US systems
had been running for many years and could not be powered off, because the
disk drives would seize and not spin up due to an absence of lubricant (as
I was told).  This presented some challenges, as I liked to power cycle
systems I worked on and could not do this here.  The release was deployed
on Valentine's Day, 1997.  It was the worst deployment in the service's
history.  Most everything broke.  System test hadn't found these very many
latent bugs that were deployed.  It was all hands on deck, working all
hours 7x24 with two conference calls a day with the Operations organization
(running the servers) and the Customer Care organization (fielding customer
complaints) until things quieted down towards the end of March.

It was then that I was able to pay more attention to future plans, which
were to replace the 3B2's with Stratus hardware running their fault
tolerant unix (FTX).  We had a number of their dual processor systems in
lab test and had just taken delivery of a four processor system, which is
what my predecessor had specified for purchase to replace all of the US
based 3B2's.  A group of 3 engineers (one of whom I had hired in 1980)
worked on running benchmarks of GMS workloads on the Stratus systems and
working with Stratus engineers to get fixes to problems in their code when
they arose.  They presented the first set of quad processor benchmarks to
me and they were all slower than the "twin" (or 2 processor) benchmarks.  I
requested daily updates on the status of this as it was bizarre and indeed
a disaster for our plans.  This culminated in my requesting that Stratus
send a small group of their FTX engineers to my location for (what I
called) a formal architecture review of the Quad and FTX.  The review was
scheduled for a week.  After the first morning, I told them that they
should go back to Stratus and that we'd be in touch.  I wrote the following
in an email to my boss, my product manager peer and a handful of others:


Yesterday, 4/15/97, Stratus engineers from their hardware development, FTX
(UNIX) development and performance and design groups met with members of
GMS R&D and AT&T Labs to share information about the Stratus and GMS
architectures.


Executive summary: the Quad will never work for GMS.


The Stratus 1225 (aka "Twin"), is a true SMP (symmetric multi-processor).  The
two CPUs each have a one megabyte instruction cache and a one megabyte data
cache, and they both share a memory system of 512 megabytes.  Cache
coherency is maintained by a pair of custom chips (ASICs). When data is in
a processor's cache, there is no contention possible.  When data is in the
memory system, there is an additional penalty of between 250-390
nanoseconds. Input and output take place on a slower bus.


The Stratus 1245 (aka "Quad") consists of two twin boards that communicate
via the I/O (i.e., slow) bus. This is not symmetric, hence not SMP.  Each
board contains 512MB of memory.  All of the Unix kernel data resides on one
board (the boot board).  When a processor on the non-boot board needs to
access memory on the boot board, the cost is 1700 nanoseconds (a penalty of
4.4 to 6.8 times worse).


Since all Unix kernel data resides on the boot board, any software that
makes significant use of Unix system calls (e.g., GMS) will pay a high
penalty when running on the non-boot board. Further, if a program (e.g.,
the GMS User Agent) is simultaneously running on both boards, its
instructions will reside in the memory of only one of the boards, thus
incurring significant overhead to access instructions for some processes.


It appears that the hardware designers never consulted with the Unix
designers. They are located in different locations (Massachusetts and
California), which can't help.  They claim they've seen between 1.4 and 1.6
times improvement in going from Twin to Quad for other customers. They do
note, however, that an optimal application for the Quad is

one which needs to execute application user-mode instructions and make very
few system calls (e.g., a graphics rendering application).  GMS, in its
current architecture, assumes free and easy access to system calls.  GMS
can never run well on a Quad.


We should immediately abandon any efforts aimed at deploying Quads and
focus all of our attention on extracting compensatory Twins from Stratus.


Needless to say, we were able to get an appropriate number of Twins and
retired all of our 3B2s.

Alan





On Mon, Nov 28, 2022 at 5:45 PM Marc Donner <marc.donner@gmail.com> wrote:

> IBM built a major semiconductor fab up in Fishkill, NY.  About two hours
> drive north of NYC.  At one point (mid-1980s) it was the biggest fab in the
> world according to some metric.
>
> On Mon, Nov 28, 2022, 17:35 ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I was visiting Holmdel in 1981, and there was a tradeshow for the BellMAC
>> CPUs there, filling ground floor of the central atrium. There was some
>> swag, which I had for a few years, including refrigerator magnets. The one
>> I remember:
>> "Don't be alone, call MACphone!"
>>
>> I remember reading an article in the early 80s pointing out that, due to
>> the scale of the Bell System, the center of the universe of semiconductor
>> fabrication at that time was ... Allentown, PA. Western Electric had an ad,
>> along the lines of, "who will create the 256 Kb memory part? WE will" -- WE
>> as in Western Electric.Those parts would have been fabbed in Allentown
>> IIRC.
>>
>>  It is a bit hard to recall, much less believe. but PA, land of dead
>> still mills, the Molly Maguires, and underground coal mine fires that will
>> burn for centuries, also had silicon.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Nov 28, 2022 at 1:01 PM Kenneth Goodwin <
>> kennethgoodwin56@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> That must be the 300 B superhive model CPU
>>>
>>> On Mon, Nov 28, 2022, 1:54 PM William Corcoran <wlc@jctaylor.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> I have a 3b2/300.  Anytime you run a command that is compute bound,
>>>> like factoring a large prime number, the CPU buzzes!
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Bill Corcoran
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Nov 27, 2022, at 9:52 AM, John P. Linderman <jpl.jpl@gmail.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> 
>>>>
>>>> [EXTERNAL]
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> We were "gifted" a 3B2, as in "take this and use it!". I ran a "ps"
>>>> command in single user mode, and it took 20 seconds to run.
>>>> Our machine names were themed around bird names, so we christened the
>>>> 3B2 "junco". Our director said we had to get along,
>>>> so we renamed it "jay". But everyone knew what the J stood for. The 3B2
>>>> served as a doorstop.
>>>>
>>>> On Sat, Nov 26, 2022 at 11:44 PM Phil Budne <phil@ultimate.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Larry McVoy wrote:
>>>>> > I read the Wikipedia page on the 9000.  It's sad that the 9000
>>>>> > wasn't cancelled when they had better alternatives.
>>>>>
>>>>> In an oral history Bob Supnik described Ken Olsen couldn't get his
>>>>> head around the fact that the NVAX chip could equal the 9000:
>>>>>
>>>>> @2:59:45 in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3tcCBHRIfU
>>>>>
>>>>> In part 2, Bob described how then DEC VP Gordon Bell having earlier
>>>>> predicted when the microprocessor performance curve would cross over
>>>>> minis and mainframes:
>>>>>
>>>>> @1:51:45 in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3tcCBHRIfU
>>>>>
>>>>> He also talks about how the company couldn't command the bsame gross
>>>>> margins as it did in the VAX era.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> THIS IS AN EXTERNAL EMAIL -- This email was sent from someone OUTSIDE
>>>> of the NSM Insurance Group email system. PLEASE USE CAUTION WHEN REVIEWING
>>>> THIS EMAIL.
>>>>
>>>>

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[TUHS] Re: Reaction to the 3B2 at Bell Labs

[alan]

It would be nice to get more technical information on the 3B2s.  As late 
as 2016, I had reached out to Ed Eckart the archivist at Alcatel-Lucent 
and Seth had contacted William Caughlin at AT&T archives for more 
information.  Both seemed to indicate the systems were still in use at 
some customer sites and thus detailed technical info (eg. schematics, 
theory of operation docs, etc) could not be shared with the public.  But 
that sort of information was preserved and safe.

If anyone has contacts into either organization, a gentile nudge would 
be appreciated! :)

-Alan

On 2022-11-26 13:46, 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

[TUHS] Re: Reaction to the 3B2 at Bell Labs

[Mary Ann Horton]

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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

       Available on Amazon and bn.com!

	<https://www.amazon.com/Trailblazer-Lighting-Transgender-Equality-Corporate-ebook/dp/B0B8F2BR9B>



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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[TUHS] Re: Reaction to the 3B2 at Bell Labs

[Kevin Bowling]

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On Mon, Nov 28, 2022 at 6:51 PM Alan Glasser <alanglasser@gmail.com> wrote:

> A few 3B2 stories...
>
> In the late 1970's  there were no 3B2's (yet), but there was the MAC 8
> processor.  The name "MAC 8" was problematic to me and my coworkers: it
> stood for Microprocessor Advisory Committee.  It was a processor designed
> by a committee!  It was slow and more problematically, it was not hardware
> compatible with Intel 8080 support chips.  I don't remember all of the
> details but it was an edge versus level set of problems.  It was fun to
> program.  There was an evaluation box (called a MacTutor) that you
> connected to an RS-232 line to connect it with a PDP-11 UNIX system for
> cross-assembly/cross-compiling (the assembler language was as close to C as
> an assembler language could get).  The MacTutor was a fun toy.  The MAC 8
> in production hardware (at least in Holmdel) was a disaster.  See
> https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_westernEleC8TUTORJul79_3968770/mode/2up
>
> In the early 1980's, I was a Bell Labs technical supervisor in a number of
> different development (in contrast to research) organizations. There was
> considerable pressure on my management (and me) to utilize 3B2's instead of
> DEC hardware; a little later (about 1986) there was pressure to use 6300's
> and later 6386's (which ran UNIX).
>
> My first experience with an original 3B2 (one without a model number) was
> identical to that of John P Linderman's.  Compiling a modest C program took
> forever.  A little later they gave that one a model number of 300 and came
> out with a 400, which was almost reasonable and a 310 which, I believe, had
> the same processor and clock as a 400 with less expansion slots. Later came
> the 600 and 700, which were pretty reasonable and we used them for a number
> of products (DEFINITY Manager 3 for administering a large PBX was one I
> brought to market with my team).
>

There’s a 600G model that was used in large quantities by the US Government
(DoD).

The later models (600 to 1000) support multiple processors.  I find these
later machines fairly interesting but can see how the market would have
been set for Sun and DEC.

And then there were a couple 11xx models with MIPS CPUs..


> In October, 1996 I was promoted to development department head of Global
> Messaging Services (GMS) which was better known as AT&T Mail.  It was a
> hectic time to be joining the organization as the job I took had been being
> filled temporarily by another person (who was a friend of mine and, like
> me, was new to the organization) and they were in the final throes of
> development of a significant new release, about to go into system test (in
> another department).  One of the first things I learned is that the service
> ran on many 3b2/600's mostly in two locations in the US, but had many small
> worldwide locations (Hong Kong, Tokyo, Sydney, Tel Aviv, London, Moscow,
> and some others I don't remember) all connected by DataKit.  The US systems
> had been running for many years and could not be powered off, because the
> disk drives would seize and not spin up due to an absence of lubricant (as
> I was told).  This presented some challenges, as I liked to power cycle
> systems I worked on and could not do this here.  The release was deployed
> on Valentine's Day, 1997.  It was the worst deployment in the service's
> history.  Most everything broke.  System test hadn't found these very many
> latent bugs that were deployed.  It was all hands on deck, working all
> hours 7x24 with two conference calls a day with the Operations organization
> (running the servers) and the Customer Care organization (fielding customer
> complaints) until things quieted down towards the end of March.
>
> It was then that I was able to pay more attention to future plans, which
> were to replace the 3B2's with Stratus hardware running their fault
> tolerant unix (FTX).  We had a number of their dual processor systems in
> lab test and had just taken delivery of a four processor system, which is
> what my predecessor had specified for purchase to replace all of the US
> based 3B2's.  A group of 3 engineers (one of whom I had hired in 1980)
> worked on running benchmarks of GMS workloads on the Stratus systems and
> working with Stratus engineers to get fixes to problems in their code when
> they arose.  They presented the first set of quad processor benchmarks to
> me and they were all slower than the "twin" (or 2 processor) benchmarks.  I
> requested daily updates on the status of this as it was bizarre and indeed
> a disaster for our plans.  This culminated in my requesting that Stratus
> send a small group of their FTX engineers to my location for (what I
> called) a formal architecture review of the Quad and FTX.  The review was
> scheduled for a week.  After the first morning, I told them that they
> should go back to Stratus and that we'd be in touch.  I wrote the following
> in an email to my boss, my product manager peer and a handful of others:
>
>
> Yesterday, 4/15/97, Stratus engineers from their hardware development, FTX
> (UNIX) development and performance and design groups met with members of
> GMS R&D and AT&T Labs to share information about the Stratus and GMS
> architectures.
>
>
> Executive summary: the Quad will never work for GMS.
>
>
> The Stratus 1225 (aka "Twin"), is a true SMP (symmetric multi-processor).
> The two CPUs each have a one megabyte instruction cache and a one megabyte
> data cache, and they both share a memory system of 512 megabytes.  Cache
> coherency is maintained by a pair of custom chips (ASICs). When data is in
> a processor's cache, there is no contention possible.  When data is in
> the memory system, there is an additional penalty of between 250-390
> nanoseconds. Input and output take place on a slower bus.
>
>
> The Stratus 1245 (aka "Quad") consists of two twin boards that communicate
> via the I/O (i.e., slow) bus. This is not symmetric, hence not SMP.  Each
> board contains 512MB of memory.  All of the Unix kernel data resides on
> one board (the boot board).  When a processor on the non-boot board needs
> to access memory on the boot board, the cost is 1700 nanoseconds (a penalty
> of 4.4 to 6.8 times worse).
>
>
> Since all Unix kernel data resides on the boot board, any software that
> makes significant use of Unix system calls (e.g., GMS) will pay a high
> penalty when running on the non-boot board. Further, if a program (e.g.,
> the GMS User Agent) is simultaneously running on both boards, its
> instructions will reside in the memory of only one of the boards, thus
> incurring significant overhead to access instructions for some processes.
>
>
> It appears that the hardware designers never consulted with the Unix
> designers. They are located in different locations (Massachusetts and
> California), which can't help.  They claim they've seen between 1.4 and
> 1.6 times improvement in going from Twin to Quad for other customers. They
> do note, however, that an optimal application for the Quad is
>
> one which needs to execute application user-mode instructions and make
> very few system calls (e.g., a graphics rendering application).  GMS, in
> its current architecture, assumes free and easy access to system calls.  GMS
> can never run well on a Quad.
>
>
> We should immediately abandon any efforts aimed at deploying Quads and
> focus all of our attention on extracting compensatory Twins from Stratus.
>
>
> Needless to say, we were able to get an appropriate number of Twins and
> retired all of our 3B2s.
>
> Alan
>
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, Nov 28, 2022 at 5:45 PM Marc Donner <marc.donner@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> IBM built a major semiconductor fab up in Fishkill, NY.  About two hours
>> drive north of NYC.  At one point (mid-1980s) it was the biggest fab in the
>> world according to some metric.
>>
>> On Mon, Nov 28, 2022, 17:35 ron minnich <rminnich@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I was visiting Holmdel in 1981, and there was a tradeshow for the
>>> BellMAC CPUs there, filling ground floor of the central atrium. There was
>>> some swag, which I had for a few years, including refrigerator magnets. The
>>> one I remember:
>>> "Don't be alone, call MACphone!"
>>>
>>> I remember reading an article in the early 80s pointing out that, due to
>>> the scale of the Bell System, the center of the universe of semiconductor
>>> fabrication at that time was ... Allentown, PA. Western Electric had an ad,
>>> along the lines of, "who will create the 256 Kb memory part? WE will" -- WE
>>> as in Western Electric.Those parts would have been fabbed in Allentown
>>> IIRC.
>>>
>>>  It is a bit hard to recall, much less believe. but PA, land of dead
>>> still mills, the Molly Maguires, and underground coal mine fires that will
>>> burn for centuries, also had silicon.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Mon, Nov 28, 2022 at 1:01 PM Kenneth Goodwin <
>>> kennethgoodwin56@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> That must be the 300 B superhive model CPU
>>>>
>>>> On Mon, Nov 28, 2022, 1:54 PM William Corcoran <wlc@jctaylor.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> I have a 3b2/300.  Anytime you run a command that is compute bound,
>>>>> like factoring a large prime number, the CPU buzzes!
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Bill Corcoran
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> On Nov 27, 2022, at 9:52 AM, John P. Linderman <jpl.jpl@gmail.com>
>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> 
>>>>>
>>>>> [EXTERNAL]
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> We were "gifted" a 3B2, as in "take this and use it!". I ran a "ps"
>>>>> command in single user mode, and it took 20 seconds to run.
>>>>> Our machine names were themed around bird names, so we christened the
>>>>> 3B2 "junco". Our director said we had to get along,
>>>>> so we renamed it "jay". But everyone knew what the J stood for. The
>>>>> 3B2 served as a doorstop.
>>>>>
>>>>> On Sat, Nov 26, 2022 at 11:44 PM Phil Budne <phil@ultimate.com> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> Larry McVoy wrote:
>>>>>> > I read the Wikipedia page on the 9000.  It's sad that the 9000
>>>>>> > wasn't cancelled when they had better alternatives.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> In an oral history Bob Supnik described Ken Olsen couldn't get his
>>>>>> head around the fact that the NVAX chip could equal the 9000:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> @2:59:45 in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3tcCBHRIfU
>>>>>>
>>>>>> In part 2, Bob described how then DEC VP Gordon Bell having earlier
>>>>>> predicted when the microprocessor performance curve would cross over
>>>>>> minis and mainframes:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> @1:51:45 in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3tcCBHRIfU
>>>>>>
>>>>>> He also talks about how the company couldn't command the bsame gross
>>>>>> margins as it did in the VAX era.
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> THIS IS AN EXTERNAL EMAIL -- This email was sent from someone OUTSIDE
>>>>> of the NSM Insurance Group email system. PLEASE USE CAUTION WHEN REVIEWING
>>>>> THIS EMAIL.
>>>>>
>>>>>

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[TUHS] Re: Reaction to the 3B2 at Bell Labs

[Andrew Hume]

i was working at building 5 at murray hill in system V development land
when the first 3B20 arrived. the first order of business? running off to the
local Sears store to buy 4 car batteries so it could power up. what a hoot!

[TUHS] Re: Reaction to the 3B2 at Bell Labs

[arnold]

Andrew Hume <andrew@humeweb.com> wrote:

> i was working at building 5 at murray hill in system V development land
> when the first 3B20 arrived. the first order of business? running off to the
> local Sears store to buy 4 car batteries so it could power up. what a hoot!

So what did the 3B20s run when they were being used in a Telco? Unix?
Or some other specialized OS?

Or was said 3B20 a prototype before they'd been deployed to the Telcos?

Thanks,

Arnold

[TUHS] Re: Reaction to the 3B2 at Bell Labs

[Skip Tavakkolian]

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3B20D's that were used for cellular switches used DMERT.

I worked for McCaw Cellular (Cellular One) in mid-late 80's. They had
several AT&T switches. The monitoring and management system at the NOC in
Seattle was developed by BL (I think it was Indian Hill). It was called
MFOS and ran on 3B2-400s and used Datakits for networking.


On Thu, Dec 1, 2022, 12:54 AM <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:

> Andrew Hume <andrew@humeweb.com> wrote:
>
> > i was working at building 5 at murray hill in system V development land
> > when the first 3B20 arrived. the first order of business? running off to
> the
> > local Sears store to buy 4 car batteries so it could power up. what a
> hoot!
>
> So what did the 3B20s run when they were being used in a Telco? Unix?
> Or some other specialized OS?
>
> Or was said 3B20 a prototype before they'd been deployed to the Telcos?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Arnold
>

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[TUHS] Re: Reaction to the 3B2 at Bell Labs

[Andrew Hume]

umm, we were porting System V to it. which was modestly straight forward.
as Skip remarked, the duplex versions (3B20D) ran DMERT, but singular
3B20’s were also common, and the plan was for them to run System V.
(as far as i can recall; this was around 1982 or so.)

> On Dec 1, 2022, at 12:53 AM, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> 
> Andrew Hume <andrew@humeweb.com> wrote:
> 
>> i was working at building 5 at murray hill in system V development land
>> when the first 3B20 arrived. the first order of business? running off to the
>> local Sears store to buy 4 car batteries so it could power up. what a hoot!
> 
> So what did the 3B20s run when they were being used in a Telco? Unix?
> Or some other specialized OS?
> 
> Or was said 3B20 a prototype before they'd been deployed to the Telcos?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Arnold

[TUHS] Re: Reaction to the 3B2 at Bell Labs

[arnold]

I see. Thanks!

Andrew Hume <andrew@humeweb.com> wrote:

> umm, we were porting System V to it. which was modestly straight forward.
> as Skip remarked, the duplex versions (3B20D) ran DMERT, but singular
> 3B20’s were also common, and the plan was for them to run System V.
> (as far as i can recall; this was around 1982 or so.)
>
> > On Dec 1, 2022, at 12:53 AM, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> > 
> > Andrew Hume <andrew@humeweb.com> wrote:
> > 
> >> i was working at building 5 at murray hill in system V development land
> >> when the first 3B20 arrived. the first order of business? running off to the
> >> local Sears store to buy 4 car batteries so it could power up. what a hoot!
> > 
> > So what did the 3B20s run when they were being used in a Telco? Unix?
> > Or some other specialized OS?
> > 
> > Or was said 3B20 a prototype before they'd been deployed to the Telcos?
> > 
> > Thanks,
> > 
> > Arnold
>

[TUHS] Re: Reaction to the 3B2 at Bell Labs

[Brad Spencer]

Skip Tavakkolian <fariborz.t@gmail.com> writes:

> 3B20D's that were used for cellular switches used DMERT.
>
> I worked for McCaw Cellular (Cellular One) in mid-late 80's. They had
> several AT&T switches. The monitoring and management system at the NOC in
> Seattle was developed by BL (I think it was Indian Hill). It was called
> MFOS and ran on 3B2-400s and used Datakits for networking.

Getting a bit off topic... MFOS was very much at 6200 Broad Street in
Columbus at least in the later days (although Indian Hill certainly
could have been involved).  I walked by the MFOS offices every day going
to lunch.  The group I was a part of sort of spawned out of MFOS, but
had other inputs too.  MFOS and the product I was a part of was ported /
converted / forced into to a lot of different hardware, and I believe
that the last one for MFOS was HP and HP-UX.  I pretty sure I remember
them going through the Starserver (white box Tandem systems) phase.  The
product I worked on got to skip the 3B2 systems Because Of Reasons, but
we had to interface to systems that ran on the 3B so we had one to three
in our lab(s) running simulators of the systems we were suppose to talk
to.




-- 
Brad Spencer - brad@anduin.eldar.org - KC8VKS - http://anduin.eldar.org