22 Nov
1999
22 Nov
'99
12:16 p.m.
And by the way on a different thread, WCS and UCS was
a very common option
on HP 21MX's, and on at least one model it was built in.
I'm not going to pursue the discussion about HP's being "cool" or not
any
further - I feel very strongly about the subject and might lose a few
friends if I took up the argument seriously :). Dont get me wrong - I love
my DECs too. They have their own things I like better than HP. But don't say
the old HP line is just a PDP-8 wannabe/knockoff.
Jay West
Can you point me to some more info on the HP's. I learned basic on
HP2000c's but I'd like to understand the hardware design on 'em.
I guess minicomputers can kind of become a religious issue
with the DEC vs. DG, HP vs. DEC wars... I worked for DEC, taught for
a while for Concurrent (Perkin-Elmer/Interdata/Masscomp) and Pyramid
and did support for Alliant and service on IBM Series 1's.
All I can say is the mini's were very diverse and very culturally
different (as were the companies). I figure it's a topic for one hell
of a history dissertation or a book.
Alliant was full of the folks from DG and DEC and that was quite
interesting. I found some interesting similarities between
Interdata/Perkin Elmer's Multiplexer (MUX) Bus and DEC's Unibus.
Rumor has it some ex-Interdata folks went to work for DEC
and took some ideas with them (and un-Muxed the mux bus to get the
Unibus).
There was some bad blood between the two companies. DEC PDP8's
(8E and 8A) did the chip insertion of the Perkin Elmer boards,
but they supposedly hid the 8's behind fake Perkin Elmer front panels
at one point so no one would know they had DEC hardware in house.
(and the Litton tester had a uVax in it... and there was a PDP11 in
another big $ piece of test equipment...)
The only thing the mini field service engineers usually had in common
was a serious dislike for the white shirt, blue suit, red tie IBM
mainframe CE's who wouldn't even answer a polite "Good evening..."
comment.
(I was later told by my CE when I worked for IBM was that at one time there
was a corporate edict which could get an IBMer fired for something like
fraternization 8-)
Still -- I think the mainframe guys did look down their noses at us mini
guys like we looked down at copier techs...
(Why was it that printer and copier techs are looked down at by senior techies
in almost any department... The hardest stuff to fix is always the
mechanical and servo based stuff, disks, tapes, printers -- and the
glory always goes to the CPU weenie with the biggest mips.)
Bill
an ex-mini generalist who served as the backup tape specialist.
9 tracks forever!
---
bpechter@shell.monmouth.com|pechter@pechter.dyndns.org
Three things never anger: First, the one who runs your DEC,
The one who does Field Service and the one who signs your check.