TU-58 questions

From: Chuck McManis <cmcmanis_at_mcmanis.com>
Date: Sun Jul 8 16:35:08 2001

At 05:11 PM 7/8/01 -0400, John wrote:
>I may have overspent my budget for pestering with that OT thing,
>but, a question here if I may. If a vS3100 can run VMS then why
>have a uVAX3100? I imagine that the stations are "crippled"
>when compared to the non-"stations". Can anyone back this up/
>fill me in a little? P.S. I have two of the supposed cripples, no software,
>but no uV3100.

No, this reflects a very interesting/troubling time for DEC and a situation
that pervades the computer 'biz even today.

"How do we get the most money out of the software?"

Which is the fundamental question. So it started with "Mainframes" and time
shared systems. One big system, hundreds of thousands of dollars, can only
be afforded by sharing time on it with several people. When you paid
$500,000 for a computer you didn't bat an eye at paying $30,000 to license
the software that let you run it as a time share system.

Now technology relentlessly marches forward and you can "create" this time
sharing architecture in a "single user" machine. No way you're going to get
$30,000 for software for that machine, so you dress it up for the end-user
(leave out serverish things, add a frame buffer) and call that a VAXStation.

But wait, its actually just a VAX underneath and maybe you can capture a
few bucks by selling it to people who _want_ a time share system, but they
don't have a machine room. Now we'll call that a "MicroVAX".

Same hardware, different target, different name, and more importantly,
software for the MicroVAX was _much_ more expensive than software for a
VAXStation since it was for multiple users.

It used to be that people found this out the hard way when they removed the
frame buffer cards and suddenly the OS believes its on a MicroVAX rather
than a VAXStation and the license PAKs all refuse to work.

So the only difference between a MicroVAX 3100 and a VAXStation 3100 is
that the ROM of the latter complains when there is no frame buffer :-)

You can run them both headless or with heads, both will run VMS 7.2 (the
latest), and both will run NetBSD 1.5 (also the latest). The Hobbyist
licenses (currently screwed up at the moment) work in either mode.

--Chuck
Received on Sun Jul 08 2001 - 16:35:08 BST