Eric Thomas <[log in to unmask]> writes:
 
> The reason is that (before I came to work here) we bought a rack 370 box.
> Major mistake. To start  with, the 4341 I was using in  1985 was not only
> faster  but above  all  more  reliable. Marketing  said  this 9370  could
> operate in a regular office  environment, provided there was a reasonable
> air conditioning  system. Marketing  also said the  disk units  were very
> fast, 3Mb/sec  transfer rate,  3380-level (anyone  who uses  9335's knows
> this is  a good candidate  for the Guinness Joke  of the Year  award, but
> when you don't have  one it's none too obvious).
 
  We "upgraded" from a 4331-M02 with 3340 disks and 3420 tapes to a 9375
with 9335 disks and the "real" tape drive (3422, maybe? I forget the model).
It was a total disaster. The disks were horribly slow, the machine died for
no obvious reason several times a day (we were getting new microcode nightly
from Endicott), and were experiencing odd SP5 problems on it as well. It was
impossible to apply service for Cobol (Level II said "let it run as long as
it needs, it'll finish eventally". We killed the apply after 7 days elapsed
time).
 
  Our acceptance benchmarks showed utterly unacceptable performance (as an
example, compiling a trivial cobol program on our production 4331 took less
than 5 minutes, but took 23 minutes on the otherwise idle 9375). We were told
that there was "new disk microcode" coming which would "speed things up". We
were later told by another rep that that was untrue.
 
  We found that unplugging a 3278 would frequently hang the integrated 327x
controller (this may be the same problem Eric is seeing) for extended periods
of time.
 
  During this fiasco, most of out computing work was moved to a VAX 11/780,
and our instructors and students decided they liked it better than the IBM
system (which may have been entirely based on turnaround time on an idle 780,
compared with a loaded 4331).
 
  Anyway, we refused to accept the 9375 and it went back to IBM. The 4331
phaseout was completed, and we became an all-DEC shop. IBM did a wonderful
job of selling us DEC CPU's.
 
        Terry Kennedy           Operations Manager, Academic Computing
        [log in to unmask]     St. Peter's College, US
        [log in to unmask]    (201) 915-9381