26 Mar
2004
26 Mar
'04
8:30 a.m.
I don't remember whether DEC ever made CDROM
drives. But
I can't think of any they did make: the RRD50 and RRD40 were
rebadged Philips drives, the RRD42-RRD46 were (I think) all
Sony. I don't recall there ever being an RRD41.
so they could make the media in volume. The plan at
the time
was to put CDROM drives into every VAX and put all the
software on one CDROM. (Back then software was small enough
that you could do this...). Apparently, this is why License
Manager was invented. I don't remember the date for this
anymore -- it seems to me it would have been somewhere around 1985.
I have an early "prototype" CDROM that eventually grew to be the
Layered Products offering. I'd have to check but the date was
1990 or maybe 1989.
License Manager was definitely created mostly because the trend
towards shipping software on CDROM was spotted relatively early
(or so I was told by those who were there). There was definitely
a rule that software on the CDROM had to support LM. The DECnis
fell foul of this rule (cries of "never mind the PAK look at
the size of the *?@&^$+ dongle" apparently fell on deaf ears)
and its software was eventually pulled. I'm pretty sure that
the terminal servers and the other "standalone" routing products
survived the cull, but DECnis never clawed its way back onto the
distribution (AFAICR).
Antonio
--
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Antonio Carlini arcarlini(a)iee.org