Re: The joy of FORTRAN

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