24 Oct
1999
24 Oct
'99
7:44 p.m.
Bill Pechter <pechter(a)pechter.dyndns.org> wrote:
You could outrun the RH11 and Unibus pretty easily
with stuff like
the RP07's and RM05's... The Unibus was a great idea, but they needed
a Massbus->Memory interconnect that didn't use the Unibus
for stuff like the 11/44 to perform with reasonable storage loads...
Which is, of course, the main reason why the 11/44 didn't displace the
11/70. The 11/70 had a *much* longer product life than most minicomputers,
because it was designed to support a lot more I/O bandwidth than was
actually needed at its introduction in 1975.
Of course, even the 11/70 eventually couldn't keep up with newer
peripherals, so they redesigned the Massbus interface to add FIFOs.
This doesn't increase the overall disk-to-memory bandwidth, but it
allowed the use of disks with higher peak transfer rates.