23 Jun
2010
23 Jun
'10
10:48 a.m.
arcarlini at iee.org wrote:
I've read somewhere that it [PDP-11/74] was full
of flat ribbon cables
and would
have been a beast to maintain.
I've heard that too, but it doesn't make sense. Lots of machines were
full of cables of various sorts, including flat cables, and that didn't
inherently make them especially hard to maintain. It sounds like an
excuse that the marketing department generated, not engineering.
Naturally a four-processor system would be harder to maintain than a
one-processor system. If they didn't make at least some minimal
provisions for serviceability, then it would be more than 4x as hard.
However, with some serviceability provisions, it becomes only slightly
harder. If you read the few docs that exist on the 11/74, the designers
most definitely did include serviceability provisions.
The 11/74 probably would have been *easier* to maintain than the
VAX-11/780 was.
Eric