Gee, what a topic for LSTSRV-L...
 
BITNIC's 9377-90 has been fairly reliable actually.  We did have one
9335 controller which was faulting once or twice a month and bringing
the system down--and there is an interesting hardware bug that Bruce
Crabill discovered--but I am not dissapointed with the box.  It is
certainly better than the 4361 we had, and I've actually found the
9335s to perform fairly well although not nearly at 3380 levels (and no one
in *our* marketing area ever claimed that was the case).
 
It's possible I guess that the model 90 has the bus bandwidth to milk
the 9335s and get decent performance out of them.  But we are nearing CPU
saturation on the 90 and I certainly don't think we would have lasted
this long on a slower model.
 
As for the contention that DEC hardware is more reliable than IBM,
suffice it to say I have had different experiences (and I started out
managing DEC systems ;-)
 
Andy