[TUHS] Why did PDPs become so popular?

[Paul Winalski]

On 12/29/17, Ron Natalie <ron at ronnatalie.com> wrote:
> The Alpha was hot
> stuff for about nine months.   Ran OSF/1 formerly DigitalUnix formerly
> OSF/1.

Digital UNIX for the VAX was indeed derived from OSF/1.  The port to
Alpha was called Tru64 UNIX.

Tru64 UNIX was initially a pure 64-bit system, with no provision for
building or running 32-bit program images.  This turned out to be a
mistake .  DEC found out that a lot of ISVs had code that implicitly
"knew" that sizeof() a pointer was the same as sizeof(int) was the
same as 4 bytes.  Tru64 was forced to implement a 32-bit compatibility
mode.

There was also a problem with the C compiler initially developed at
DECwest in Seattle.  It supported ONLY ANSI standard C and issued
fatal errors for violations/extensions of the standard.  We (DEC
mainstream compiler group) called it the Rush Limbaugh
compiler--extremely conservative, and you can't argue with it.

-Paul W.