20 Dec
2007
20 Dec
'07
8:53 a.m.
On Dec 19, 2007, at 6:07 PM, Roy J. Tellason wrote:
And in reading about the various IBM boxes, only one
word comes to
mind: "Baroque"!
I wouldn't say that- although I admit that on first looking at even the
RS/6000 (and later hearing about the AS/400 and S/3XX) was "weird".
IBMs are just a different mindset than DECs. A way of looking at it is
that IBM moved "downmarket" and DEC moved "upmarket" (similar thing
with most of the computers we see: they started out at the lower end,
and then later on the manufacturers decided to put together a big
machine for certain customers (PDP-10, SGI PowerSeries, Sun E10k, VAX
9000 ...)
IBM also had a paradigm early, and those tend to stick.