Re: KA410 Boot Failure With TKZ-50

[Thor Lancelot Simon <tls%panix.com@localhost>]

On Sun, Jun 14, 2020 at 07:21:17PM +0200, Johnny Billquist wrote:
> 
> No, I'm pretty sure the TKZ-50 was explicitly made for the uVAX2000. That
> machine only have an MFM interface for disks, and a SCSI controller, who's
> only purpose was to connect to the tape drive. There were nothing else in
> it.
> 
> Also, the form factor of the TKZ-50 case is identical to the uVAX2000, and
> they were stacked on top of each other, if I remember right.

The TKZ-50 is the controller, no?  The TK-50 is the drive; sold as a
"standalone" SCSI unit (in a case which was very similar, but not identical,
to the uV/VS2000, and indeed would stack with it) it was a "TK50Z".

I used and supported a lot of TK50s in that enclosure that were sold with
new DECstations.  The TK50 didn't have adequate capacity to actually back
up the drives typically installed in these machines; but then again, we
also sold a lot of 100MB drives that weren't large enough to install the
then-current release of Ultrix and had to take them back and replace them
for free, so...

Sun did a really brisk business chasing around behind us selling the next
order of workstations to customers afflicted by our inability to properly
configure what we sold such that it was useful in real-world configurations.
We'd sell 10 or 20 pmaxes, configured with 104MB drives they couldn't boot
Ultrix from, a TK50 tape drive that couldn't realistically back up drives
of the size from which you _could_ boot such machines, and the awful
in-house color monitors that cost the same as the DEC-branded Trinitron
but which the salespeople preferred because they knew we made a higher
margin on it (and were, consequently, incented to sell).  While we were
haggling with the customer over whether we were going to replace all
their drives or just give them one big drive for a "fileserver" and
convert all their other machines to "diskless" (few customers were stupid
enough to go for this, but it was the standard first offer in the DEC
office I worked in), Sun would cold-call the customer and offer to bring
by a SparcStation 1 as a demo.  They'd send it along with a sales engineer
who was savvy enough to point out that the SS1 could run just fine,
actually, from a 100MB disk drive, because SunOS had shared libraries.
And they'd shake their heads sympathetically over the awful DEC monitors
and mention that Sun *only* sold Trinitrons so it wasn't possible to order
the wrong thing.  They'd make a point of installing the OS on-site from
QICtape so the customer could see it was about 3-5X faster than the TK50.
And so on.

When I went from being a customer on the one end of this to a DEC employee
in the span of a few months, it's safe to say I arrived with a lurking
fear that I might be starting my career at a company that couldn't get out
of its own wayWhen I went from being a customer on the one end of this to a
DEC employee in the span of a few months, it's safe to say I arrived with a
lurking fear that I might be starting my career at a company that couldn't
get out of its own way.  The layoffs that started two months later didn't
do anything to dispel this impression...

What was always such a shame about DEC was that they had really good stuff
they _could_ sell, but many customers ended up with garbage (like the TK50
or, frankly, most of the VAX workstations), instead.  It'd be a different
world if they'd aggressively pushed the quality products instead of
focusing on squeezing every last possible dime out of the awful ones.  Case
in point, why were we selling brand-new TK50s with expensive workstations
in 1991 and 1992?  Hell if I know.  The TK70 was backwards-compatible, had
more capacity, and was literally 5X as fast.  Compare to Sun, who routinely
threw customers free upgrades (they'd order SS1s and be delivered SS1+s,
or even order 1+s and be delivered 2s).  Of course it didn't come up
roses for them in the end either, but...better than it did for us.

Thor

> 
>   Johnny
> 
> -- 
> Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
>                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
> email: bqt%softjar.se@localhost             ||  Reading murder books
> pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol

-- 
 Thor Lancelot Simon	                                     tls%panix.com@localhost
  "Whether or not there's hope for change is not the question.  If you
   want to be a free person, you don't stand up for human rights because
   it will work, but because it is right."	--Andrei Sakharov