A legendary tragic failure, the archetypal Hacker Dream Gone Wrong. Ma
RS was the code name for a family of PDP-10 compatible compute
RS built by Systems Concepts (now, The SC Group): the multi-processor SC-30M, the small uniprocessor SC-25M, and the never-built superprocessor SC-40M. These machines were marvels of engineering design although not much slower than the unique
Foonly F-1, they were physically smaller and consumed less power than the much slower DEC KS10 or Foonly F-2, F-3, or F-4 machines. They were also completely compatible with the DEC KL10, and ran all KL10 binaries (including the operating system) with no modifications at about 2--3 times faster than a KL10. When DEC cancelled the Jupiter project in 1983, Systems Concepts should have made a bundle selling their machine into shops with a lot of software investment in PDP-10s, and in fact their spring 1984 announcement generated a great deal of excitement in the PDP-10 world.
TOPS-10 was running on the Ma
RS by the summer of 1984, and
TOPS-20 by early fall. Unfortunately, the hacke
RS running Systems Concepts were much better at designing machines than at mass producing or selling them the company allowed itself to be sidetracked by a bout of perfectionism into continually improving the design, and lost credibility as delivery dates continued to slip. They also overpriced the product ridiculously they believed they were competing with the KL10 and VAX 8600 and failed to reckon with the likes of Sun Microsystems and other hungry startups building workstations with power comparable to the KL10 at a fraction of the price. By the time SC shipped the fi
RSt SC-30M to Stanford in late 1985, most custome
RS had already made the traumatic decision to abandon the PDP-10, usually for VMS or Unix boxes. Most of the Ma
RS compute
RS built ended up being purchased by
CompuServe. This tale and the related saga of
Foonly hold a lesson for hacke
RS: if you want to play in the
Real World, you need to learn Real World moves. [
Jargon File]
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