Punch Cards.

[David L. Gehrt]

<snip>

> I do hope I had nothing to do with DEC's demise...

I can't say  about your incident, but  I think I may have  a better idea
about the  demise of DEC.  In the  early `80s I was  responsible for the
computing  facility  of  a  computer science  research  institute.   Our
computers were  two DEC Vaxen,  an 11/730 :-(  and an 11/780.   The `780
came  equipped  with  Dec's  latest  disk and  controller  system.   The
controller was a UDA-50 and the disk were like 756 MB (Then quite large)
RA series drives.   The operating systems we ran were  4.1c BSD then 4.2
BSD.

The disk drive were pretty good EXCEPT the spindle bearings were made of
some space age material prone  to disintegration after a short period of
use.  I knew DEC  was going to be in trouble when  the repair guy stated
that the problem we had with  those bearings was because we were running
UNIX not DEC's VMS OS.


dlg