I believe the 11/68 was known as the Bluefin and was cancelled fairly early
on before it was out of prototype. I think Ontario Hydro was the place that
got the 11/74's. I never heard of AT&T having them. My wife was in AT&T,
Bell Labs and Bellcore and she never heard of one of them there.
The last of the 11/74 KB11-CM cpus were used internal at DEC when they had
to ship a ton of refurb 11/70's to AT&T. (they were out of production and
wouldn't meet the FCC regs... so DEC called in a bunch of their 11/70
systems from Software Development and Field Service and shipped the newer
cpu's from the 11/74 project to them as a replacement.
We got one at DEC Princeton around 83 or so... Just different enough to
require separate not-too-available spares. They were used for a short time
with RSTS/E until the internal stuff moved to VAX/VMS.
There also was a system called Unicorn (which I think was another extended
11 prototype which was the development of the VAX SBI bus and MA780 memory
-- later used in the VAX but built before that.
Bill
On 10/6/06, Gooijen, Henk <henk.gooijen at oce.com> wrote:
Hi all,
last week I had 2 visitors from HP Storage Systems in my museum.
They both started with DIGITAL back in 1981, and love the old
systems. They have visited me before :-)
While in my little museum they saw the H960 rack with the console
of the PDP-11/60 on a 10.5" filler panel, and said something about
a 'nice mock-up'.
Ahh, I said, that is *not* a mock-up, but a real operational 11/60,
but I did not have the space for the low-boy corporate cabinet, so
I built the complete 11/60 in this H960 rack.
To prove it, I switched on the system :-) You can read the story
of the 11/60 on my website (PDP-11/60 folder, "11/60 in H960 rack").
Anyway, one tech told me that there was also a PDP-11/68 (no typo)!
The 11/68 was just like the famous 11/74, he told.
DIGITAL delivered four 11/74 to customers, but called those
machines back. 3 Customers obeyed, but one (AT&T) said "forget it",
and never returned the 11/74 to DIGITAL.
The tech also told that the 11/68 was cancelled because it would
out-perform the other new introduced machine (VAX-11/780, et al).
I found a very small bit of information in the PDP-11 FAQ, in the
section "The Never 11's" ...
Don North added the following *first hand* information:
<quote>
My recollection of the 11/68 was that it was a follow on to the 11/60,
intended to remedy the shortcomings (18b vs 22b mode) and increase
performance to beyond 11/70 level (ie, be an 11/70 replacement). It
was staffed by mostly the key designers from the 11/60 project. IIRC
technology was to be the same gatearrays (400 cell TI ISTL?) that were
ultimately used in the VAX Comet aka 11/750.
At this time I had moved from 11/60 diagnostics to 11/74 CISP
microcode. Most of the 11/68 (then known as 11/6X) development
was in the next aisle over in the facility in Tewksbury MA.
Anyway, I don't think the 11/68 project was all the widely known.
It never got past the paper design stage before it was canceled.
Most of the design team ended up leaving DEC shortly after to join
Three Rivers (aka PERQ) in establishing a design center in Massachusetts
(Three Rivers was located in Pittsburgh near CMU and they had trouble
attracting people to come there). I even went there for an interview
but declined the job offer. Good thing; the Mass design center lasted
about 9mos or so before folding. Seems the CTO/Founder of Three Rivers
just could not 'let go' of the desire/need to make EVERY technical
decision for the company. Having a remote design center of course was
then impossible. All the ex-DEC/PERQ guys then went on to form a startup
(Mosaic Technologies) which built a graphical workstation using the
newly announced National NS32032 VAX-like CPU. They had a booth at
SIGGRAPH 80 or 81 IIRC but then shortly ran out of money, and later
folded.
</quote>
Perhaps, this is info to be added to "The Never 11's" section ?
- Henk, PA8PDP.
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