16 Apr
2001
16 Apr
'01
11:11 a.m.
I have to agree that they were well integrated and solidly supported. Since it
does take a bit of time and the pace of the industry tends to deny that time to
the developer, it does drive intentionally designed-reliable products away from
the leading edge. Moreover, the DEC integration did tend to do a complete job
of integrating the features of new interface standards as they became available,
unlike IBM-PC types, which never used more than the basic read and write
capability of the drives on the PC. Whereas performance testing of the MV-II
against a 12.5 MHz PC/AT indicated the PC/AT could compute somewhat faster,
DEC's OS and disk subsystem integration (MSCP) exploited the capabilities of
SCSI to such an extent that the overall performance in multi-drive tests had the
MV-II performing at nearly double the overall performance of the the PC-AT
clones at 12.5 MHz with identical drives.
The last time I had hands on a DEC machine was in 1989. I don't know how the
newer ones stacked up against the later-generation PC's in terms of compute
power, but I doubt the PC's did any better with their disk interface management.
Nevertheless, DEC's gone, and the PC's aren't. I, for one, am not going to
miss
them.
Dick
----- Original Message -----
From: "Bill Pechter" <pechter(a)pechter.dyndns.org>
To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org>
Sent: Monday, April 16, 2001 7:37 AM
Subject: DEC prices and designs behind the times?
Tour"
> To start with the switcher in question is 1987
design maybe earlier.
> The MV2000 was available in 87 or 88 if memory
> serves. And even if I'm wrong it's very definatly pre1990.
>
> Dec often used standardized designs for years despite technology.
> Regarding you comment on rotating technology.. your wrong. The biggest
>problem is that often the older technologies were kept available too long or
> in service too long. Add to that usually
> at least 50% of the rotating memory was not even DEC to start with. Look at
the DEC designed products.
Allison
Dick also neglects to understand the additional maintainability and
diagnostic features DEC added to the drives they built and the ones
added on via the DCL and RM adapter which gave them superior maintanability
and ease of diagnosis.
Just compare the TM03 or RP06 diags with those of their competitors
at the same time.
I'll take the DEC ones any day. Very few third party controllers
had half the maintainablily features of the DEC ones.
Emulex was probably the best all around emulating controllers.
Perkin-Elmer/Concurrent's 32 bit machines were on a diagnostic par
with very early PDP11's... or 8's.
Bill
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