From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!seismo!hao!hplabs!sri-unix!Seiler@mit-xx.arpa
Newsgroups: net.micro
Title: Re: dec pc summary
Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.275
Posted: Mon Jan 17 08:35:17 1983
Received: Thu Jan 20 03:11:56 1983

From:  Larry Seiler 

Re DMA on the Professional:  I heard from a DEC person that the private
bus does allow DMA, it's just that the disk controllers don't use it.
So there's hope for the future, especially if DEC gets lots of complaints
about this (like any intelligent company, they tend to do what the
customers want).  As for the Professional being intended as a smart terminal,
rather than a personal computer, well, that is the mode in which computer
illiterates would use any personal computer.  But several languges are
now (or will soon) be available that run directly on it (including C and
Pascal), and I think the number will increase.  If I had a choice, I'd
rather do software developement for personal computers on a large computer,
so it makes sense for DEC to offer cross compilers and the like.

Larry Seiler

PS - I heard that the ComputerLand stores finally have the DEC PC's in stock.
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