[TUHS] Old mainframe I/O speed (was: core)

[Erik E. Fair]

>Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2018 09:11:29 -0400 (EDT)
>From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa)
>
>    > From: "Erik E. Fair"
>
>    > ordered a VAX-8810 to replace two 11/780s on the promise from DEC that
>    > all our UniBus and MASSbus peripherals would still work ... which we
>    > knew (from others on the Internet who'd and tried reported their
>    > experiences) to be a lie.
>
>Just out of curiousity, why'd you all order something you knew wouldn't work?
>So you could get a better deal out of DEC for whatever you ordered instead,
>later, as they tried to make it up to you all for trying to sell you something
>broken?

Precisely. It worked too, at some cost in our time. The DEC salespeople were willing to put their lie in writing, you see ...

One of those 8650s was "apple.com" (host) for quite a number of years, as the 11/780 before it: DNS primary NS for the domain, SMTP server, NTP server (VAXen had decent, low-drift hardware clocks), UUCP/USENET host (as "apple" in that world), NNTP server - it was our public face to the world. I was given the explicit mandate to make it so when I was hired in 1988.

Unix was the OS for a wide range of facilities within Apple. Probably still is (I've been gone from there since 1997, but I still hear from folks within from time to time). As hardware got cheaper and more capable, other systems were added to the mix to provide anonymous FTP (ftp.apple.com started as a Mac IIci running A/UX under my desk), HTTP service, and so on.

The main thing that changed over time was what hardware (and version of Unix) we were running for whatever task or service (the RISC bloom was wonderful to see, even if the vendors tried bending Unix in to a proprietary lock-in thing - it's rather sad that we're mostly stuck with the awful x86 ISA after all that), and the overall character of the system use. When I arrived, Unix was used as a now-classical interactive timesharing system (with Macs as terminals - does anyone else remember the wonderful "UnixWindows" multi-windowing terminal emulator for MacOS, with its associated Unix back-end?), and by the time I left, Macs were TCP/IP hosts (peers) themselves, speaking as clients (IMAP, NNTP, HTTP) over our networks to Unix machines as servers.

	Erik Fair