Mars

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.

[Jargon File]