A legendary tragic failure, the archetypal Hacker Dream Gone Wrong. Mar
s wa
s the code name for a family of PDP-10 compatible computer
s built by
sy
stem
s Concept
s (now, The
sC Group): the multi-proce
ssor
sC-30M, the
small uniproce
ssor
sC-25M, and the never-built
superproce
ssor
sC-40M. The
se machine
s were marvel
s of engineering de
sign although not much
slower than the unique
Foonly F-1, they were phy
sically
smaller and con
sumed le
ss power than the much
slower DEC K
s10 or Foonly F-2, F-3, or F-4 machine
s. They were al
so completely compatible with the DEC KL10, and ran all KL10 binarie
s (including the operating
sy
stem) with no modification
s at about 2--3 time
s fa
ster than a KL10. When DEC cancelled the Jupiter project in 1983,
sy
stem
s Concept
s should have made a bundle
selling their machine into
shop
s with a lot of
software inve
stment in PDP-10
s, and in fact their
spring 1984 announcement generated a great deal of excitement in the PDP-10 world.
TOPs-10 wa
s running on the Mar
s by the
summer of 1984, and
TOPs-20 by early fall. Unfortunately, the hacker
s running
sy
stem
s Concept
s were much better at de
signing machine
s than at ma
ss producing or
selling them the company allowed it
self to be
sidetracked by a bout of perfectioni
sm into continually improving the de
sign, and lo
st credibility a
s delivery date
s continued to
slip. They al
so overpriced the product ridiculou
sly they believed they were competing with the KL10 and VAX 8600 and failed to reckon with the like
s of
sun Micro
sy
stem
s and other hungry
startup
s building work
station
s with power comparable to the KL10 at a fraction of the price. By the time
sC
shipped the fir
st
sC-30M to
stanford in late 1985, mo
st cu
stomer
s had already made the traumatic deci
sion to abandon the PDP-10, u
sually for VM
s or Unix boxe
s. Mo
st of the Mar
s computer
s built ended up being purcha
sed by
Compuserve. Thi
s tale and the related
saga of
Foonly hold a le
sson for hacker
s: if you want to play in the
Real World, you need to learn Real World move
s. [
Jargon File]
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