Shoot, Don, had I known you are a veteran of the early "big-iron"
> workstation wars, I wouldn't have fretted so much. The advantage of a
> career in R&D was that I got to live on the bleeding edge of technology.
> I always hoped for the best but tried to plan for the worst. I could
> tell you stories going back to early DEC PDP8s and the first shipped
> PDP11s (yes, I'm that old, although Gene Heskett has me beat), and
> covering almost every minicomputer/workstation maker since. Of SGI, I
> have bittersweet memories. I knew they were nearing the end when the
> sales people started spending so much time with me---it meant no one
> else was buying so my pinch-penny purchases were visible in their
> quarterly sales reports.
>
> As for your exemplar experiences, you left off my personal favorite: If
> there is an undiscovered bug in a mature software product I will be the
> one to discover it because my application is apparently the only one in
> the universe to exercise that particular logic path. I say "apparently"
> because the vendor always says this is the first they'd heard of it.
>
> The good news to me is that you're up and running.
>
> Regards,
> Kent
>
> Kent;
Your comments above sounds like my biography.
I was with DEC from summer 68 to summer 69. Cape Canaveral was winding
down and I had been programing their PDP4 while working for RCA as a
Technical Instructor on the Range Telemetry Systems. I Had to leave DEC,
the wife couldn't take the Mass winter allergies. Then I became one of DEC's
customers using their PDP10 as a Time Sharing service provider.
DEC had it right, filling the world with PDPs until Ken Olsen's famous
decision
"who needs a computer in their home"? Even after that they produced a chip
computer that reportedly knocked the socks off the stuff coming out of
Silicon
Valley. But it was too late. I understand the buyer of the bankrupt DEC
shelved
the chip. I am guessing the PC clones were the "in thing" for the
flourishing
home entertainment market and there was no market for a better computer.
As for the "the vendor always says this is the first they'd heard of it".
While I was waiting for Silicon Graphics to get their product together,
(that I
mentioned in the previous post), I was using UNIX workstations with
Graphics Cards to develop the software. Every time the system crashed
it would recheck (redo) the disk files linkage that were not stored on
shutdown.
Well, you never knew which version the next piece of the source file was
linked.
Then you had a source file parts current and parts obsolete. Called the
Vendor
and guess what they said. They worked on it for a week and gave up. As far
as
I know UNIX still has that feature, and I thought I saw it in one of the
earlier
Linux versions. I don't remember which UNIX we were using, Berkley or
the one back East (Dartmouth?).
Thanks
Don (a 36 model)
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Nokia and AT&T present the 2010 Calling All Innovators-North America contest
Create new apps & games for the Nokia N8 for consumers in U.S. and Canada
$10 million total in prizes - $4M cash, 500 devices, nearly $6M in marketing
Develop with Nokia Qt SDK, Web Runtime, or Java and Publish to Ovi Store
http://p.sf.net/sfu/nokia-dev2dev
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