VMS is not the evil empire

[George W. Leach]

In article <418 at nbc1.UUCP> abs at nbc1.UUCP (Andrew Siegel) writes:
>In article <20469 at bu-cs.BU.EDU> bzs at bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein) writes:
>>DEC's pathological resistance to providing hardware service on Vaxes
>>running Ultrix or Unix is a good reason not to buy Vaxes, it's no
>>reason not to buy Unix which can be had from responsible vendors.
>
>Correction (partial): DEC *does* support VAXes running ULTRIX.
>We've had ULTRIX since June '85, and have had hardware support all
>along.

      Well when I was with Bellcore our lab utilized Ultrix 1.0 on some
VAX 780's.  I really don't remember how the hardware support was, but I
never heard any complaints.  The complaints were on the software front.
In order for the system administrator to perform diagnostic tests, s/he
would first have to boot VMS!!!  Another problem we had was that we were
sold a machine with 16 Mg of main memory.  Ultrix only could address 8 Mg!


      Now, of course all that has changed and it was their first attempt at
UNIX, but VMS was king and the Ultrix customers were well aware of it.  That
led us to drop DEC and go with Pyramid and CCI for our development machines.
The experiences with DEC left a bad taste in people's mouths.  Those kinds
of experiences are rather difficult to overcome, even if DEC has allegedly
changed their tune on Ultrix.



-- 
George W. Leach					Paradyne Corporation
{gatech,rutgers,attmail}!codas!pdn!reggie	Mail stop LF-207
Phone: (813) 530-2376				P.O. Box 2826
						Largo, FL  34649-2826