We were writing an Ada compiler for the 370 platform and we had one of these to assist in testing. One of our main developers, Simon Fitzmaurice stated that he could compile faster by hand than the XT/370. I remember him sitting down and doing the compilation himself to prove it...
Hi Dean, That's very amusing! I'm guessing that if you had access to a real 370 then you'd really, really want to use that. The XT/370 might have seemed like a good cost saving measure but it's not much use if no-one wants to use it!
Very interesting article. I worked on the qualification of the Intel math coprocessor at IBM which was code named "Cornrow", a reference to Bo Derek's hairstyle in the popular 1980s movie "10". Those were interesting times. IBM help save Intel with an almost 20% share in the company which almost put IBM out of business a decade later. Thankfully both are still around today and are still innovating and essential to the technology industry.
In the same time period DEC was working on a desktop PDP-10. It never saw the light of day as DEC dropped their entire mainframe business to concentrate on the more-profitable minicomputer business. Maybe mainframe manufactures had PC FOMO?
We were writing an Ada compiler for the 370 platform and we had one of these to assist in testing. One of our main developers, Simon Fitzmaurice stated that he could compile faster by hand than the XT/370. I remember him sitting down and doing the compilation himself to prove it...
Hi Dean, That's very amusing! I'm guessing that if you had access to a real 370 then you'd really, really want to use that. The XT/370 might have seemed like a good cost saving measure but it's not much use if no-one wants to use it!
Very interesting article. I worked on the qualification of the Intel math coprocessor at IBM which was code named "Cornrow", a reference to Bo Derek's hairstyle in the popular 1980s movie "10". Those were interesting times. IBM help save Intel with an almost 20% share in the company which almost put IBM out of business a decade later. Thankfully both are still around today and are still innovating and essential to the technology industry.
In the same time period DEC was working on a desktop PDP-10. It never saw the light of day as DEC dropped their entire mainframe business to concentrate on the more-profitable minicomputer business. Maybe mainframe manufactures had PC FOMO?
The MicroPDP found its way into many products that just weren't marketed as PDPs. Terminal servers for instance, were PDPs under the skin.
Looking forward to your next article...since I own two P/370s and two P/390s, all Micro Channel and all running (and all in RS/6000 hosts).