Typo -- funding in the 50s -- sorry...

On Wed, Dec 27, 2017 at 4:51 PM, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
You are mixing a couple of different stories I fear...

If you want the full story get a copy of:   Computer Engineering: A DEC View of Hardware Systems Design

But a snap shot for this mailing list is this ...  The PDP term was used by KO when he was funding Digital because the VC's the 60s did not believe that a computer company would succeed.   But making things for the instrumentation market (Lincoln Labs, Livermore, etc.).   This is how PDP-1 came to be.  The PDP term was keep for the first 25 years (until the Vax and renaming of the PDP-10/PDP-20 to DECSystem 10/20). [The 1 begat the 6, 9, 15 an 10 families].

The concept of purchasing smaller system, was indeed true.   This was the idea behind the >>mini-computer<< or minimal computer that Gordon Bell who lad left DEC temporarily to be a CMU Prof for a time began to explore.   He took the idea and commercialized and the PDP-8 line was the first in that line.  The 11 & 15 were full computer systems.  DEC also made something called the PDP-16 'Register Transfer Modules' (RTMs) which was an attempt to make the small controller idea even more accessible, but the Intel microprocessor would eclipse them (I think I was the last group at CMU was talk a course using them.   Another factoid, the predecessor to VHDL/Verilog and the like, ISPL and ISPS actually spit out 'code' for DEC RTM modules instead of gates).

But the key point is that in 1975 dollars, a PDP-11/40 system that was good enough to run something like Sixth Edition of UNIX cost somewhere between $50k-$150k.   This would have been much, much cheaper than say a PDP-10, or a equivilent IBM 'mainframe' size system which would have started above $1M.

Clem  

On Wed, Dec 27, 2017 at 4:02 PM, Alec Muffett <alec.muffett@gmail.com> wrote:
I apologise if this is too far from the main topic, but I wanted to check an urban legend.

There is a story - as I have heard it told - that PDPs established their place (and popularity) in the marketplace by pointedly *not* advertising themselves as "computers", but instead as "programmed data processors".

This was because - so the story goes - that everyone in corporations of the time simply *knew* that "computers" came only from IBM, lived in big datacentres, had million-dollar price-tags, and required extensive project management to purchase; whereas nobody cared enough about a thing called a "programmed data processor" to bother bikeshedding the few-tens-or-hundreds-of-thousands-of-dollars purchase proposal to an inevitable death. Thus, they flitted under the purchasing radar, and sold like hotcakes.

I wonder: does this story have substance, please?

Aside from anything else: I draw parallels to the adoption of Linux by Wall St, and the subsequent adoption of virtualisation / AWS by business - now reflected in companies explaining to ISO27001 auditors that "well, we don't actually possess any physical servers..."

    - alec

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