8 May
2007
8 May
'07
5:35 a.m.
Johnny Billquist wrote:
One man's opinion, I guess.
www.mentec.com is the corporate site I haven't seen mention of
anything
PDP-11 related on it for quite some time. OTOH www.mentec-inc.com is the
US-based PDP-11 site that up until last year was up and running, and had
info on all their RT/RSX/RSTS products. For the last year or so
www.mentec-inc.com has been offline and 'under construction' (and still is).
All of this is just my opinion, of course.
Don North
PDP-11/44 owner running 2.11BSD since nuthin' else is legit.
[...snipped...]
"Rod Smallwood" <RodSmallwood at mail.ediconsulting.co.uk> skrev:
[...snipped...]
> 1. Are Mentec still selling
PDP-11 operating system licenses?
Yes. As someone who have customers who still buy from Mentec I can
definitely confirm that they were still selling ten months ago. Can't
see a reason why they should have stopped since then. This is RSX and
layered products, by the way.
I can understand that Mentec might be making money
from ongoing monthly
support contracts, but I fail to be convinced that Mentec is making any
money from selling *new* PDP-11 software licenses. Do do so would assume
the deployment of 'new' currently unlicensed PDP-11 systems, which I
would think is highly unlikely at this point. Where would the hardware
come from, other that used equipment liquidators selling old systems?
The only other application would be running PDP-11 applications on new
E11 (or Charon) or SIMH platforms, which to me seems laughable from a
business perspective.
If I went into *any* vendor at this point and saw they were running
their computing environment on PDP-8s/PDP-11s I'd immediately run for
the nearest exit.
However I'd still like to know what are the
answers to the
fundimental questions:
2. Are they still making PDP-11 hardware?
No. I think they stopped manufacturing "real" PDP-11 hardware, and are
now pushing for emulators. However, that is a grey zone. We haven't
had a real "true" PDP-11 CPU since the 11/20. All the rest are
microcoded. Microcode is also software. :-) 3. Why have Mentec removed all mention of
PDP-11 products from
their web sites.
That is a really good question, and one which I don't have an answer
to. But I'd like to know if someone else have.
Johnny