On Thu, 27 Jan 2000, Ted Lemon wrote:

# This is drifting way off the tech-kern topic, so one well-placed flame
# will shut me up, *but*...  The 11/780 may have taken up a tenth the
# wall space, but it also did a tenth as much...  Less than that.  IIRC,
# the DECsystem 20 was a 5 mips machine.

...back when MIPS meant something.

DECsystem 20 -- that ran Twenex, right?

# The one at WPI was easily
# capable of handling 50 users doing compiles and running emacs, as long
# as one of us (me) wasn't rebuilding the C compiler.  A VAX 11/780
# couldn't possibly take that load.
#
# Bringing things back to the present, NetBSD now has many of the things
# that TOPS-20 had that VMS didn't - e.g., a PMAP JSYS^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H
# mmap syscall.   It also does some things right that TOPS-20 didn't
# (e.g., -lreadline instead of a COMND JSYS).   Of course, -lreadline is
# still missing some of the niftier features of the COMND JSYS...
# 
# Sigh.
# 

Ah, memories.  I'm still a newbie compared to some...started on a VAX
11/750 ("Four washers and a fridge!") in 1984 (running 4.1 BSD UNIX).
Someone had then made a comment that it was a take off on Multics, had
advanced to UNIX, and suggested that it be rewritten to take advantage of
even more modern features and be renamed MULTIX, to come full...er,
spiral.

Well, I dare say we're just about here -- any takers?

				--*greywolf;
--
NetBSD: Microsoft asks you where you wan to go, NetBSD gets you there.