[Elecraft] Now that we know

[Charlie Hicks]

Walking down memory lane here...

I started on an IBM 1620 writing Fortran in the late 60's.  You first had to
punch the source cards/deck then load the compiler deck then run the source
deck.  It output to an object deck (card punch).  You then ran an absolute
loader then loaded the object deck and hoped something was output on the TTY
or punch.

I started building 8008 kits in the early 70's then finally got into a Z80
system.  First ones I built had no OS, no floppy, no tape, no hard disk.  I
toggled in everything through the front panel in machine code.  You learned
the system real well that way!  I thought I was doing great when i 1976 or
so I got a North Star 5-1/4" floppy with a Basic disk OS.

I later worked on PDP-8's, then PDP-10's and PDP-11's running RSX, RT-11 and
finally RSTS/E.  Then came the VAX 780 and VMS, then clusters (in 1983),
then the Alpha later.  Microsoft cluster still don't hold a candle to the
VMS clusters DEC had in the 80's.

I wrote a lot of Macro on the all the DEC machines and used to pour over the
VMS OS source code (VMS used to come with microfiche with the OS source on
it).  If you look at the OS primitives and then look at NT you'd see a LOT
of similar structures and OS design similarities - even down to the naming
of lots of things.  You're right - Cutler brought a lot of that over.
Cutler left DEC for Microsoft after DEC killed a big hush-hush project
working called Ruby (I believe) - a new architecture and new OS.  I had a
good friend workikng with Cutler designing the new OS.  It would have blown
away anything in it's time. But they DEC killed it.  Cutler left shortly
after.

DEC blew many, many opportunities in networking, OS architecture, etc.  If
they could have figured out how to market what they had they'd be going
strong today.

Talk about big systems and OS's way ahead of their time - take a look at the
DEC-10 and DEC-20 systems.  Compuserve used to run all their online users on
these machines.  They had true distributive processing back in the 60's and
70's.

Could you imagine what OpenVMS with it's awesone clustering abilities could
do on today's Pentium-class processors?

I have worked on DEC systems since 1978 and worked for DEC for 7 years as a
Systems + Network Consultant.  I still support an OpenVMS system for one of
my clients.  I get so tired of the bloated Microsoft code....  but it pays
the bills!

I'll step off memory lane now anbd back to radios....

Charlie K0CKH

Aha, you are using VMS then!  NT is VMS: DEC sent David Cutler to
Microsoft to write a new OS for the Alpha.  MSFT put the WIN16 and later
WIN32 API on top, but it's very much like VMS inside.
On Sun, 17 Apr 2005 3:04 pm, Kevin Rock wrote:
> My current OS is Win2K.  The splash screen says it was built on NT
> technology.  I thought NT meant New Technology?  So I am supposed to
> read it as "built on new technology technology"?