AS/400 a "VAX killer"?

[Antonio Carlini]

Ethan Dicks wrote:
> My recollection is that TCP/IP was very slow to penetrate DEC-only
> sites until Ethernet took over the desktop

DECnet (Phase IV) was trivial to set up and very easy for a system
manager to understand. You need an address which is an area plus
a node number. Pick a name. Done.

Suddenly now you can stick NODE:: in front of a filespec and pretty
much do what you did before except the file exists on some other
machine called NODE.

With IP you had to have a rudimentary understanding of IP addressing
and classes. All trivial if you've done it before or have someone to
point out the obvious answers, but trickier than DECnet.

So unless you needed interoperability with "stuff" there would have been
no reason to consider IP.

Antonio

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