8 Jan
2009
8 Jan
'09
6 p.m.
From: Lee Courtney
Sent: Wednesday, January 07, 2009 4:25 PM
Topic drift, but your post reminded me of one of the
most interesting uses
for a VAX I know of.
Back when HP was developing PA-RISC (mid-1980's)
to replace the 16-bit stack
architecture 3000 we used a VAX-750 running BSD to host a PA-RISC simulator.
[big snip ]
Of course this was all very hush-hush at the time
since HP was locked in a
death struggle with DEC in the mini-computer market. Would have been bad
press for it to get out that HP used DEC computers to design its new 32-bit
computer architecture.
Hi, Lee,
[I didn't know you had worked for HP. You may have known one of my student
friends from Stanford who worked on HP-UX for PA-RISC after he graduated, but
that's a topic for another time.]
This was not the first time, or first DEC architecture, that HP used in product
development. Several of the engineers at XKL were former DEC-20 users while
employed at HP, which used the SUDS CAD package (as did cisco Systems, where
many of them went from HP). Some of my old friends were the system managers
for those machines.
Rich Alderson
Server Engineer, PDPplanet Project
Vulcan, Inc.
505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900
Seattle, WA 98104
mailto:RichA at vulcan.com
(206) 342-2239
(206) 465-2916 cell