Editor religious wars (was Re: Museums)

On 1/26/10, Jason McBrien <jbmcb1 at gmail.com> wrote: When I was doing DEC stuff every day, we never had any Qbus vs Unibus tension - if you had peripherals that were largely older and larger, you probably had a Unibus box. If you came onto the scene later, especially after the uVAXen were released, lower budgets steered you towards Qbus, larger installations tended towards Unibus. All this stuff was so expensive that hobbyists rarely had Unibus equipment unless it was long past commercial viability (like having an 11/05 in the early 1980s when DEC was selling the 11/04 and 11/34). I know a few folks that had LSI-11s when they were semi-current, and for them, the "religious argument" was minicomputer vs microcomputer. That particular one was probably because the cost of DEC gear was high enough that it needed some justification in the minds of a few who shelled out for it. That's just a subset of DEC vs IBM, an old but vigorous one. You couldn't stick a VT100 on a mainframe (terminal emulator packages aside) and you couldn't stick a 3270 on a VAX, so besides arguing that the 3270 was faster (it wasn't async serial at 9600 baud) and the VT100 was cheaper (but was still well over $1500, IIRC), it came down to session-based vs interactive, which kicks upstairs to DEC vs IBM. Same thing. That one is more like it - "my workstation is better than yours!" A broader offshoot of that is CISC vs RISC, which tended to translate to either VAX vs UNIX workstation or 680x0 workstation vs RISC workstation depending on the audience and what they used every day. -ethan