17 Aug
2010
17 Aug
'10
11:59 p.m.
However, at the same time IBM's product line
consisted of machines that still cost ten times as much, could NOT be meaningfully
maintained without an operations staff and were fundamentally designed for batch
processing.
Compare apples to oranges - when the VAX-11 line was out, IBM had the
4300 line. These machines were specifically designed not to require
operations staff, a big infrastructure, pure batch operation, and so
forth. Burroughs had the 1900 line with pretty much the same low
maintenance ideas going on. The 4300 line was a huge hit for IBM (the
1900 line was so-so for Burroughs).
For counterpoint, the PDP-10 was never intended to be
anything other than a mainframe-class machine. ?Its capabilities, capacity and footprint
all served as direct competition to System/360.
They never managed to get the whole RAS thing right, so the mainframe
shops tended not to pay any attention to the PDP-10 line. They did for
the VAX, but by then DEC had learned a few things about maintenance
and reliability (and power supplies).
So DEC != minicomputer, although they were the leading
manufacturer of that class of machine for many years - indeed, until the microcomputer
began overshadowing the mini.
It is easy for us to think that, in a sort of techie-hacker-academic
way, but when the numbers all shake out, IBM may have had the biggest
slice of the pie. We just tend to ignore all those beige minicomputers
that were doing boring financial jobs in tax accounting shops and
such.
Anyway, the real answer is a machine is what it is.
--
Will