"AT&T to resell Pyramid computers" (for real)

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

gmb at occrsh.ATT.COM (Gary_M_Brammer) writes:

>We currently are using 3B4000's to run our
>production lines at the AT&T 3B/5ESS factory, and after correctly tuning the
>machines, we have experienced great results (100 users, 60000 TP1 type
>transactions per 8 hrs, and all processors > 60% idle).

I don't doubt this, however it sounds very much like you are running
one (or a few) applications in a dedicated environment. This is not
what I would consider a general purpose timesharing environment.

>  Every process
>executed on a 3B4000 should have some forethought about what I/O, memory
>resources, and CPU cycles are required (for example, vi should be marked
>to run on the processor associated with stdin and stdout).

Again, this is nice if you have a limited set of applications being run
in a static environment. That's not a very good definition of a
university computing environment. Besides, I had terminals spread across
two ACP's. Where should I stamp vi to run in a situation like that.
(And why should I have to stamp it in the first place? The kernel
should be dealing with this issue.)

>As far as dropping UNIX gurus' names, they are probably not the people
>that should be contacted for this type of question (ask them to write a
>book instead).  The correct Bell Lab personnel to contact are located
>at Indian Hill BL in Naperville, IL.

It only took us six months to find out these people even existed, and
another two months to get "permission" to talk to them. Of the bug reports
we submitted, nearly 50% were rejected by AT&T out of hand. Of the
remaining bugs, we received one fix. The remainder are still being
looked into. This isn't what I would call responsive service ...
I have a lot more faith into Thompson's comments than those I received
from most of the support staff.


Lyndon Nerenberg  VE6BBM / Computing Services / Athabasca University
  {alberta,decwrl,lsuc}!atha!lyndon || lyndon at cs.AthabascaU.CA
     "I think every man should have a wife.  You can't blame
         everything on the government."  -- Jed Clampett