Building a PDP-11 for the first time

From: Eric Smith <eric_at_brouhaha.com>
Date: Sun Dec 14 20:52:21 2003

Antonio wrote:
> I don't know what the performance figures were for the
> 11/74 either. However, the beast was deemed to be too
> hard to maintain. Too many cables, too much downtime.

That was one of the rumors, but I've never believed it. There's no
fundamental reason why it should have been any harder to maintain than
any other large computer. I think this was just a feeble attempt by
DEC management to come up with an excuse to give customers, when they
didn't want to admit the real reason the product was cancelled.

Yes, it needed more memory cables than any other PDP-11, but it's
utterly ridiculous to think that would be a serious problem. We're
only talking about 68 memory cables per CPU for a maximally configured
PDP-11/74, compared to 16 for a maximally configured PDP-11/70.
When was the last time you had a PDP-11/70 memory cable go bad?

The memory cabling was in fact comparable in magnitude to that of a
large VAX 11/782 configuration.
Received on Sun Dec 14 2003 - 20:52:21 GMT