In the lead up to Pr1me's acquisition of PRIMACS which became OAS, I flew (from New York) to London for their UK sales conference.

VERY interesting. The sales guys were slavering to get their hands on the 7(?) reels of mag tape I had brought with me, so they could get a peek at the product.

The weekend was alcohol-fuelled, and I'm a bit hazy. But three things stick in my mind.

The banquet was extravagant, and the speaker was Ken Fisher who said, among things, "The world is betting on war." Hmm.

The conference sessions were held a Beaulieu motor museum. And at a strategic point in the proceedings, there was a spitting roar from the back of the room. In drove Stirling Moss in a D-Type Jaguar. He pulled up at the front as a Pr1me employee dressed
as a copper on a bicycle rolled up and said "who do you think you are, Stirling Moss?" The group roared at this take-off of a British TV commercial. Stirling gave a sales-oriented speech, including the words "show me someone who comes second, and I'll
show you a loser." (If you are not familiar with Stirling Moss, Google him.)

The other thing that sticks in my mind was a (commercial) helicopter flight from Gatwick to Heathrow to catch my plane home. My first and only trip in a helicopter.

Peter

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

The other thing that sticks in my mind was a (commercial) helicopter
flight from Gatwick to Heathrow to catch my plane home. My first and
only trip in a helicopter.

At one point we considered porting our application (in COBOL) from Prime
to VAX. They loaned us a Microvax II to do a basic port, and then I was
mailed to Marlboro to the DEC benchmarking lab to run the thing on a
couple of types of machines. IIRC I estimated around 30 users on an
8600. Of course the thing that killed any chance of a port was the
reseller discount schedule -- Prime did a much larger percentage.

They put me on the DEC helicopter to get back to Logan for the flight
home. Sat front and center, under the drip from the roof leak, watching
over the pilot's shoulder and loved it.

De

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

Having been involved in pre-sales competition with DEC using Pr1me
50-series I can assure you moving to a VAX would have been a losing proposition. We beat out the VAX on every benchmark we ever did.
Sadly, we often found ourselves competing against, "I don't care
which machine wins as long as it says VAX on the front."

Well, until Prime got far behind the performance curve. Marketroids-
excluded performance numbers for later machines were heavily inflated.
The fastest single Prime processor was maybe 10 MIPS. And Prime never addressed the slow backplane bus in the 50 Series, so when DEC did the
higher performance interconnects, they were likely faster at I/O too.

De

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

But, it all turned out well in the end. DEC won. Delivered a
massively slower machine while waiting for the one they bid to
actually go into production. And the real story came out. DEC
had bid a VAX running VMS. The man who made the infamous quote
above was insistent on it having to be a VAX because he had
received a whole bunch of free scientific software from Kitt's
Peak Observatory. You guessed it. It all ran on BSD. :-)

Yeah, if the "benchmark" against which you're competing is in OSI
layer 8, you're screwed. Also if the specification doesn't include
critical details.

De

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

I think you missed the point. They didn't do the required benchmarks.
They couldn't because the machine they were bidding didn't exist and wouldn't exist for at least 6 months. And yet, they won.

No, I didn't miss it. OTOH, did it really make any difference in the
outcome, given the guy who was going to buy a VAX no matter what? Who
didn't put the BSD requirement in the RFQ?

De

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)