anyone read dealers of lightning?

[Brent Hilpert]

Mark Davidson wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 2:46 PM, Brent Hilpert<hilpert at cs.ubc.ca> wrote:
> > Rich Alderson wrote:
> >>
> >> De gustibus non disputandum.  However, _Soul_ is very much NOT about "the
> >> creation of Data General", which was incorporated in 1968.  It is rather
> >> about DG's effort, c. 1976, to get to market with a so-called supermini, in
> >> order to compete with DEC's VAX (which was under development at the same
> >> time).
> >
> > Can someone acquainted with both machines weigh in with an opinion of how they
> > compared in terms of performance and capability? Did the VAX win out because it
> > was DEC (market prominence, etc.) or because in the main it was a better
> > machine, or some other reason?
> >
> > (I used and programmed with 780's and 750's under both VMS and BSD in the 80's
> > but never worked with DG machines.)
> 
> I don't have nearly as much experience with VAXen as I do with DG
> machines, but I will say this (and please remember, I LOVE DG hardware
> and software)... VMS simply rocks IMHO.  AOS/VS is a very cool OS, but
> doesn't hold much of a candle to VMS.
> 
> I'll go crawl back in my hole now... :)

Well, the manufacturer operatings systems are another variable, perhaps another
way of expressing the question would be: how would the machines compare if BSD
had targetted the DG machine instead of the VAX?