[rescue] Another fine business decision for us axp-lovers

[Dave McGuire]

On June 25, Joshua D. Boyd wrote:
> Besides, unlike an IBM, who would want to run such old software for the
> most part.  I just was commenting that in practice a lot of that old
> software runs, even if it might have occasional snags.  On the otherhand,
> You can't really run 19 year old Apple programs (unless Apple2 emulators
> got a lot better recently), nor can you run 19year old SUN programs.

  That's grouping all architectures together by manufacturer, though.
You can run software written for the very first pdp11/20 (circa 1970)
on today's latest-n-greatest Mentec pdp11 cpu, but software for a
different architecture from the same manufacturer...Alpha, for
example...won't run on that new pdp11.  Apple has had more families of
computers than just Macs, and IBM has had more than just their
mainframes.

  Academic argument, though...I'm sure we understand each other's
points...

  Which brings up another interesting point.  We're now faced with the
very real possibility that the pdp11 architecture may outlive (where
"alive" is defined as "still being developed, built, and actively sold
by a vendor") the Alpha architecture.

             -Dave McGuire