Hi All. I know there are a huge number of PDP-11 fans here (me-self included) But I don't hear much about other mini-computer scale systems. Are there any other Prime Computer fans on the list? I spent a lot of years working on the things, and have mucho respect for their hardware and kernel development guys. Shit-head marketing and other problems killed off the company a couple years ago, but they had a really nice product in the "super mini" market for at least a few years running. I'd like to latch onto one of the 23xx series small machines, or even one of the last 5200 boxes. -wayne

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Almost ALL machines today use just a few chips (at most) in the CPU. The days of little glue logic chips are long gone. Some S/390s, for example, typically use only two chips in the CPU, and only for redundancy! Same with the AS/400s. Unix? What about other OSes? Even NT... Many minis do not timeshare - embedded control was and is a favorite duty. PDP-8s were single user machines (yeah, I know about TSS/8, so keep quite!), yet when someone says "mini", they instantly come to mind of many people. Many mainframe applications do not have lots of people online, all tapping away at their terminals. Some of the big boxes do their best work when everyone is sleeping. I think the best definition for a "mainframe" is a machine designed not for processor speed, but I/O speed (thus the use of channels - some mainframe CPUs actually _idle_ under a heavy load, because the channels are doing all the work). William Donzelli william(a)ans.net

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I look at it from the perspective of "what was it designed to do?" If it was designed to sit on or beside a desktop with a single user (a big clue is, does it have a memory mapped graphics system), then it's probably a micro or a workstation. All PCs, All Macs, and so forth fall into this category. With the right OS a micro can do the WORK of a small mini, but it's still a micro. If it was designed to sit in a wiring closet or a cubical and service multiple users either via xwindows, dumb terminals, file service, printer service, and so on, and can support a number of users simultaniously, and if it has a serial port for communicating with its console, it's probably a mini. All Vaxen, and I'd say all PDP11s (never met one with a memory mapped screen) and so on are minis. If it has the same qualifications as a mini, but takes up more than say 4 racks, *requires* air conditioning, it's a mainframe. An additional clue - mainframes usually don't speak unix. A mainframe does exactly the same job as a mini, except that it's much larger and can handle many more users. My reasoning for this division is something Steve Wozniac is supposed to have said, that really all the early "micros" before the apple were just small minis - they handled like minis, they interacted like mini's. With the advent of the memory mapped, integrated graphics system, the micro became a class unto itself., -- Jim Strickland jim(a)calico.litterbox.com ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Vote Meadocrat! Bill and Opus in 2000 - Who ELSE is there? -----------------------------------------------------------------------

Ahhh. I guess it shows that I've done very very little with mainframes and learned everything I know on Micros and Mini's. I stand corrected. :) -- Jim Strickland jim(a)calico.litterbox.com ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Vote Meadocrat! Bill and Opus in 2000 - Who ELSE is there? -----------------------------------------------------------------------

Well, as an old DEC guy who later worked for IBM... I agree, although with Posix Compliant mainframe software that meets the Unix spec and runs the Apache webserver... mainframes aren't mainframes anymore. (at least not the IBM 390 class ones which look like a cross between a mainframe and a Unix server) I do feel some of the flavor of the mini's is missed by the current Unix de jour environment today. VAX/VMS is not Unix or HP's MPE or Concurrent's OS/32 (which feels very IBM Mainframe -- with block mode terminals and VTAM/ITAM type access). I miss RSTS/E, RSX11(M,M+), IAS, RT11 on DEC stuff and the other neat OS's for DEC -- MUMPS, PICK etc... Bill +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Bill and/or Carolyn Pechter | pechter(a)shell.monmouth.com | | Bill Gates is a Persian cat and a monocle away from being a villain in | | a James Bond movie -- Dennis Miller | +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Crays (at least the old ones) like to be left alone to crunch, requiring human interaction just about every day when they crash or break (the price of being in front of the edge). The new ones are better. Well, I am looking...Cray, ETA, Connection Machine, Convex, Multiflow, MasPas, nCube... They are out there - I think one of the M$ biggies has a small collection of Crays and CMs. Then there is that ETA-10P in the basement of a high school out here on the East Coast. The line is really getting close these days. An UltraSPARC or Pentium whatever has the horsepower in the CPU, but the old Crays still beat them out for I/O bandwidth (and resulting sustained floating point performance). That should fall quite soon, then it will be up to the X/MPs to carry the Cray standard. William Donzelli william(a)ans.net

I have seen plenty of Pr1mes in junkyards, but most had received "the treatment" before I could pull them. Please pull all of the parts that you can out of these units - boards, heads, maybe a motor or two. S/1s definitely are not in the common category, so those of us with them (I think that makes the two of us!) will have spares in the future. We all know how standard IBM parts are... The line between micros and workstations is getting very dull, but minis are still minis and mainframes are still mainframes. Sure, everything now fits on one chip (or maybe a few - no more scads of misc), but minis tend to be multiprocessor boxes with _loads_ of memory and expandability. Mainframes, of course, can always be characterized by theie I/O channels. William Donzelli william(a)ans.net

Thanks to the loan of the tapes by Hank, the many helpful hints from Allison, the tip from Zane about standalone Backup, and the dumb luck of stumbling across some DEC manuals for installation and update of VMS v5.5 at the local swapmeet, it looks like I am on the way to having an operational MicroVAX/Station 2000. The manuals told me that Backup was contained in Tape #2/2 and, even though it was not so labled as containing it, Backup booted up. They also provided the correct syntax for a number of needed commands. I'm sure that they will prove most helpful in other areas also. As I write, the machine has booted off the RD54 and is busily loading DECwindows and all that other good stuff that comes in the installation kit. Mandatory Update will follow, and somewhere along the line I can enter my hobbyist license information (makes me honest :-)). I am sure that I will have more questions, but I certainly appreciate the help that I have been given. - don