[rescue] Finding antique machines

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Tue, 17 Apr 2007 @ 22:18 -0700, Sheldon T. Hall said:

> And those things could handle a _lot_ of activity without breaking a sweat,
> too.  Remember when CompuServe was handling three million members with a
> bunch of hopped-up TOPS-10 machines?

I thought they ran the pre-cursor to Twenex (TOPS-20)?

The story as I remember it is they bought PDP-10s, added paging and
other functions that DEC refuse to add, and rewrote TOPS.

Time passes, and DEC basically starts from the timeshare system and
creates the Decsystem-20 and TOPS-20.

Before the two systems could be merged into one product again, DEC
dropped the whole 36-bit line in favor of VAX.

For a lot of people, that was a black day.

-- 
shannon           | An Irishman is never drunk as long as he can hold onto 
                  | one blade of grass and not fall off the face of the earth.