Path: csiph.com!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Lynn Wheeler Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.os.linux.misc Subject: Re: The joy of FORTRAN Date: Fri, 07 Mar 2025 06:46:48 -1000 Organization: Wheeler&Wheeler Lines: 52 Message-ID: <87wmd0aivb.fsf@localhost> References: <20250227080310.0000604d@gmail.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Injection-Date: Fri, 07 Mar 2025 17:46:54 +0100 (CET) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="7897cf73725612e4adccdda082cfbd43"; logging-data="3823163"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1+zlop0DkOU6ZmDrHxbjkJ9PqrDLlExXco=" User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Cancel-Lock: sha1:xr/Pub9+t6o9qzNT/j/WuHWEJx4= sha1:bxGrZG5sJOLasmzcbDuwh771nm4= Xref: csiph.com alt.folklore.computers:230439 comp.os.linux.misc:66135 cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net (Dan Cross) writes: > VAX was really meant to unify the product line, offering PDP-10 > class performance in something that was architecturally > descended from the PDP-11, which remained attractive at the low > end or embedded/industrial applications. > > DEC in the 80s and 90s had a very forward-looking vision of > distributed computing; sadly they botched it on the business > side. IBM 4300s competed with VAX in the mid-range market and sold in approx same numbers in small unit orders ... bit difference was large corporations with orders for hundreds of vm/4300s (in at least one class almost 1000) at a time for placing out in departmental areas (sort of the leading edge of distributed computing tsunami). old afc post with decade of VAX sales, sliced&diced by year, model, US/non-US. https://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002f.html#0 Inside IBM, conference rooms were becoming scarce since so many were being converted to vm4341 rooms. IBM was expecting to see same explosion in 4361/4381 orders (as 4331/4341), but by 2nd half of 80s, market was moving to workstations and large PCs, 30rs of pc market share (original articles were separate URLs, now condensed to single web page (original URLs remapped to displacements) https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/ I got availability of early engineering 4341 in 1978 and IBM branch heard about it and in jan1979 con me into doing national lab benchmark (60s cdc6600 "rain/rain4" fortran) looking at getting 70 for compute farm (sort of leading edge of the coming cluster supercomputing tsunami). Then BofA was getting 60 VM/4341s for distributed System/R (original SQL/relational) pilot. upthread mentioned doing HA/CMP (targeted for both technical/scientific and commercial) cluster scale-up (and then it is transferred for announce as IBM Supercomputer for technical/scientific *ONLY*) and we were told we couldn't work on anything with more than four processors. 801/risc (PC/RT, RS/6000) didn't have coherent cache so didn't have SMP scale-up ... only scale-up method was cluster ... 1993 large mainframe compared to RS/6000 ES/9000-982 : 8CPU 408MIPS, 51MIPS/CPU RS6000/990 : 126MIPS; 16-system: 2BIPS; 1280system: 16BIPS executive we reported to went over to head up AIM/Somerset to do single-chip power/pc ... and picked up Motorola 88k bus ... so could then do SMP configs (and/or clusters of SMP) -- virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970