On Tue, 2 Nov 1999, Lord Isildur wrote:

> why do yo usay this about the 6000's? 

First of all, no pdp-11 compatibility. :-)

But actually, what I miss are a real front end! Heck, ^P shouldn't halt
the system, it should just throw you back to the FE. That's not something
that has anything to do with the VAX. And you should be able to check the
temp at various places in the cab, and also the quality of the regulated
powers, and all in software. And it should be *big*. The 6000-series are
small machines. You can't take machines that size seriously.

> the 86x0's are the last of the 780-like machines, that is true.. 

Yup.
Or 11/79x, as they are also known...

> but the XMI is a wonder to behold, and the extension of the nexus model 
> to all devices is the fullfillment of the sheer VAXishness of the 
> things!!  i mean, what's not to like about an ethernet card that 
> manipulates page tables!!!!!! 

I'm not that sold into ethernet cards that manipulate page tables. :-)
I am, however, sold on separate busses for everything. Massive bandwidth!
Two A-buses, SBI, many unibuses, many massbuses, separate memory bus. Can
you not dig it?

Distributed power, man. XMI may be nifty and all, but once you really load
an 86x0 up, it will burn cycles.

> > I guess I must be in minority to regard the 6000-series as ugly...
> > Now, give me a 86x0... *That's* a nice machine. The ultimate VAX, if you
> > ask me. (Okay, I'll consider a 9000/10000 too...)
> 
> eew! the 10000's are nothing like the 9000s! (well, ok, in some ways they 
> are), but the 7000 and 10000 are more like big alpha's than VAXen!!! 
> a single swap and they _are_ big alphas!!! 
> architecturally theyre not very vaxlike. 

Since I've never had the pleasure to work with anything larger than the
8650, I'll take your word for it then, change my remark to just the
9000...

> i'll certainly concede that i'd love to have an 8650, because i _do_ 
> aopreciate its connection to the older heritage of the original VAXen. 
> (i'd love to see a shrink of an 8650 into a nice small cabinet!!) 

I have access to two 8650... :-)

...*what*??? An 8650 is a small cabinet??? What on earth for? Are you for
placing your brain is a glass jar too? :-)

It's the whole package that makes it so attractive!

Imagine this:

A dark room, an 8650 and a terminal.
The 8650 has the doors opened. Turning the power on on the 8650 just turns
on a single diode on one power supply in the 8650. The terminal shows that
the front end is booting. After a while the terminal prints:
"INITIALIZING POWER"
and one after one, the power supply LEDs lights up, and after about 8
seconds, you have a nice warm glow from a line of power supplies, all now
initialized and supplying power.
"INITIALIZING CPU"
and you know that the CPU is now fed microcode from the RL02 on which the
front end is running. You also know that if you care to, you can get to
the RT-11 prompt on the front end, start up your favourite editor and
change the microcode you you like that. Once this step is done, you'll
actually have a VAX. Before this, there is nothing.
("And the FE loaded the microcode and said ''Let there be VAX'', and there
was VAX, and everyone was happy.")
"INITIALIZING MEMORY"
now the memory system gets fed whatever it likes. Soon the system will
actually be a whole computer, who will start to boot, or whatever,
depending on how you set the keys.

Ahhh, drool. Now, that's a computer.

"6000s? We don't need to stinkin' 6000s!" :-)

	Johnny

Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                  ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt@update.uu.se           ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol