Mars n.
A legendary tragic failure, the archetypal Hacker Dream Gone
Wrong. Mars was the code name for a family of PDP-10 compatible
computers 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 Mars
by the summer of 1984, and TOPS-20 by early fall. Unfortunately,
the hackers 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 first SC-30M to Stanford in
late 1985, most customers had already made the traumatic decision
to abandon the PDP-10, usually for VMS or Unix boxes. Most of the
Mars computers built ended up being purchased by CompuServe.
This tale and the related saga of Foonly hold a lesson for hackers: if you want
to play in the Real World, you
need to learn Real World moves.