I was at I think the 1990 or 1991 New York Computer Show at Jacob Javitts and IBM had a booth setup with a ton of the small BA440 sized AS400's and they were streaming video across a network onto a presentation screen from one, running Novell on another, I thought perhaps they were running a derivative of OS/2 (but I'm not totally certain) and then running others with standard AS/400 apps on others. The IBM rep's were touting their abilities and DEC Vax's were mentioned several times during the course of casual conversations I overheard throughout the booth. They were really pushing the AS/400's as the end all, beat all workhorse machine. Curt Richard wrote:

Richard wrote: There's a lot of room for shades of gray in there (what does 'forced' mean, and how far, and when) but I'd say there is a good deal of validity to that argument. In the 80's DEC and IBM were pretty big on pushing their own 'networking solutions' and did their best to avoid open protocols, at least above the link level. TCP/IP didn't have the degree of prominence in the networking world in those days as it does today. There was also resistance to open protocols at the customer level if those customers were already ensconced in the proprietary networks. A lot of people were looking only at their immediate needs rather than seeing the future of an 'interconnected world'. (As I've said before on the list) there was at least one third-party producing a TCP/IP stack for VMS before DEC got around to it. To my recollection, IBM was even later in taking up TCP/IP, although one might have to distinguish between mainframe and PC stuff. Put another way, DEC and IBM didn't support TCP/IP until they 'had to' (as in market forces).

On Tue, Jan 08, 2008 at 03:21:57PM -0700, Richard wrote: I worked in a DEC/IBM environment from about 1984 through 1994 (with a few dabbles off-track here and there). We made cards for PDP-11s and VAXen (COMBOARDs) to speak IBM protocols like HASP, 3780, and SNA. I attended several DECUS symposia over the period, and read all the relevant trade rags of the day. With that background, I _do_ remember the AS/400 being pushed as a "VAX killer" in the late 1980s. Perhaps we saw more of that because we had customers with feet in both camps. My recollection is that TCP/IP was very slow to penetrate DEC-only sites until Ethernet took over the desktop and TCP/IP crowded out also-rans like Banyan Vines, etc. (and Windows finally came with build-in TCP/IP support). Colleges and sites that had a high installed base of UNIX workstations did aggressively adopt TCP/IP, and did install it on VAX/VMS, for those places that weren't VAX/UNIX shops. I know our shop wasn't representative, but we used sync and async serial comms (Kermit or HASP or DECnet/DDCMP) to link our VAXen and MicroVAXen all the way through 'til the end. We never did have a single strand of Ethernet, nor pushed a single packet of TCP/IP anywhere - it was all "proprietary" protocols specifically because we didn't have to interoperate between any two vendors except DEC and IBM, and we happened to make our own interoperability gear. By 1994, most other "DEC shops" were already opening up, IIRC. -ethan -- Ethan Dicks, A-333-S Current South Pole Weather at 16-Jan-2008 at 02:00 Z South Pole Station PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -15.0 F (-26.1 C) Windchill -35.9 F (-37.7 C) APO AP 96598 Wind 10.0 kts Grid 33 Barometer 687.2 mb (10358 ft) Ethan.Dicks at usap.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html