I have to agree that they were well integrated and solidly supported. Since it
does take a bit of time and the pace of the industry tends to deny that time to
the developer, it does drive intentionally designed-reliable products away from
the leading edge. Moreover, the DEC integration did tend to do a complete job
of integrating the features of new interface standards as they became available,
unlike IBM-PC types, which never used more than the basic read and write
capability of the drives on the PC. Whereas performance testing of the MV-II
against a 12.5 MHz PC/AT indicated the PC/AT could compute somewhat faster,
DEC's OS and disk subsystem integration (MSCP) exploited the capabilities of
SCSI to such an extent that the overall performance in multi-drive tests had the
MV-II performing at nearly double the overall performance of the the PC-AT
clones at 12.5 MHz with identical drives.
The last time I had hands on a DEC machine was in 1989. I don't know how the
newer ones stacked up against the later-generation PC's in terms of compute
power, but I doubt the PC's did any better with their disk interface management.
Nevertheless, DEC's gone, and the PC's aren't. I, for one, am not going to miss
them.
Dick
----- Original Message -----
From: "Bill Pechter" <pechter_at_pechter.dyndns.org>
To: <classiccmp_at_classiccmp.org>
Sent: Monday, April 16, 2001 7:37 AM
Subject: DEC prices and designs behind the times?
> > To start with the switcher in question is 1987 design maybe earlier.
> > The MV2000 was available in 87 or 88 if memory
> > serves. And even if I'm wrong it's very definatly pre1990.
> >
> > Dec often used standardized designs for years despite technology.
> > Regarding you comment on rotating technology.. your wrong. The biggest
> >problem is that often the older technologies were kept available too long or
> > in service too long. Add to that usually
> > at least 50% of the rotating memory was not even DEC to start with. Look at
the DEC designed products.
> >
> > Allison
>
> Dick also neglects to understand the additional maintainability and
> diagnostic features DEC added to the drives they built and the ones
> added on via the DCL and RM adapter which gave them superior maintanability
> and ease of diagnosis.
>
> Just compare the TM03 or RP06 diags with those of their competitors
> at the same time.
>
> I'll take the DEC ones any day. Very few third party controllers
> had half the maintainablily features of the DEC ones.
>
> Emulex was probably the best all around emulating controllers.
>
> Perkin-Elmer/Concurrent's 32 bit machines were on a diagnostic par
> with very early PDP11's... or 8's.
>
> Bill
>
>
> --
> bpechter_at_monmouth.com | FreeBSD since 1.0.2, Linux since 0.99.10
> Brainbench MVP | Unix Sys Admin since Sys V/BSD 4.2
> Unix Sys.Admin. | Windows System Administration: "Magical Misery
Tour"
>
>
Received on Mon Apr 16 2001 - 10:11:01 BST