Here's something to consider.

From: Bill/Carolyn Pechter <pechter_at_shell.monmouth.com>
Date: Mon Sep 14 13:40:32 1998

> < The lesson of this story is, you can have the best, most amazing produc
> < in the world, but "build it and they will come" does not apply. You've
> < got to advertise. Apple was obviously more masterful at this.
>
> DEC did not learn that several times over starting with the PDP-11/150
> (destop pdp-11 system), the VT180, Pro350 and Rainbow. Yet the DECMATE
> series which were fairly capable but generally used for wordprocessing
> are like flies!
>
> Allison
>

The DECmate had one of the nicest word processing systems. Non-techies
could pick up the DECmate and be productive in hours. Kind of like the
Wang word processing copied by MultiMate.

Compare that to Wordstar (a slick word processor for some of us who
don't mind roff/troff like dot commands and who are willing to learn
control codes).

The VT180 and PDP150 suffered from lack of hard disk and were condemned
to a too-soon trash heap. I have the VT180 at home and still love it
with WPS-80 (for DECmate like) word processing. The PDT150 was a nice
RT11 box -- but disk access was slow and limited to the two RX01 like
floppies. RX50 size disks would've been better. A 20 meg hard disk
would've been outstanding. (I didn't even miss the lack of XM or
any memory management on the PDT). I ran RT11 v5 with FB and System Job
support to run RTMON on a VT100 with my console being a PC with VT100
emulation.

I ran DECnet from home to DEC over a serial link (1200 baud) and found
it would've been slick if there was only less swapping and load time.

Bill

+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Bill and/or Carolyn Pechter | pechter_at_shell.monmouth.com |
| Bill Gates is a Persian cat and a monocle away from being a villain in |
| a James Bond movie -- Dennis Miller |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Received on Mon Sep 14 1998 - 13:40:32 BST