You apparently never had to share a 3B20 (around 1 MIP) with 200 other CS1401 students desperately trying to get their Pascal project to compile before the midnight deadline. 15m for 'hello world'? If you're lucky.
Eeeeeep. I was lucky that my big CS courses were done on a Sequent Balance 8000 equipped with six NS32032 CPUs and room for six more. Yup, SMP in the mid-1980s. That machine positively flew on loads that would bring the neighboring Pyramid 90x to its knees.
I had an account on a 3B20, and it did not impress me in the least, but the 3B2/400 boxes in one lab were pretty reasonable for being small systems. What a shame that the WE32000 didn't get any traction.
Before I went down to UIUC, the junior college had a Prime 650, and all compile jobs were run through a queue precisely to avoid having the machine get crushed.
That's kinda funny...we musta lived in parallel worlds.
The 3B20 might have been slow, but it had a solid I/O subsystem so you could load it up with users, and was generally reliable (it was originally built as a telco switch control processor looking for 5-nines uptime). But by the later 80s the industry had moved on, and we were in the process of migrating those CS classes from the 3B20 to either a Sequent Symmetry (follow-on to the Balance with something like 16x i386) or a Pyramid 90x, depending on the class. The Symmetry was...not reliable. The 90x was worse. The wails of a lab full of undergrads realizing the shared machine had just taken a dirt-nap and all their work with it was a far too common sound. Good times.
We also had a bunch of 3b2s, most with an AT&T 5620 'windowing terminal' attached, which is a really fascinating 'what might have been' if bitmapped workstations and X11 hadn't taken over that niche. I ended up with a Sun 3/160 for most of that time, and the rest is history.
flyinghamster|4 days ago
I had an account on a 3B20, and it did not impress me in the least, but the 3B2/400 boxes in one lab were pretty reasonable for being small systems. What a shame that the WE32000 didn't get any traction.
Before I went down to UIUC, the junior college had a Prime 650, and all compile jobs were run through a queue precisely to avoid having the machine get crushed.
kjs3|3 days ago
The 3B20 might have been slow, but it had a solid I/O subsystem so you could load it up with users, and was generally reliable (it was originally built as a telco switch control processor looking for 5-nines uptime). But by the later 80s the industry had moved on, and we were in the process of migrating those CS classes from the 3B20 to either a Sequent Symmetry (follow-on to the Balance with something like 16x i386) or a Pyramid 90x, depending on the class. The Symmetry was...not reliable. The 90x was worse. The wails of a lab full of undergrads realizing the shared machine had just taken a dirt-nap and all their work with it was a far too common sound. Good times.
We also had a bunch of 3b2s, most with an AT&T 5620 'windowing terminal' attached, which is a really fascinating 'what might have been' if bitmapped workstations and X11 hadn't taken over that niche. I ended up with a Sun 3/160 for most of that time, and the rest is history.