I started working on Stratus machines right out of high school... They took me from backwoods New England to Wall St.
The were Awesome machines - don't let those filthy hobbitsis...err..tandem users cloud your judgement. Stratus was pure hardware FT, and tandem... wasn't :-P
Vos was pretty nice too - decent macro language - not all the utils you expect with a unix box, but in terms of the core OS and shell it was pretty good machine .. 40 years later I still love those machines and the career they helped get me into :-D
I spent six months programming on VOS after a gig on a VAX. Yes, I'll be outside telling the kids to get off my lawn as soon as I find my reading glasses and have a nap.
VOS was intuitive and did what I needed. Nothing flashy. Just useful. I miss that sometimes. Give me a tool that works; if it also happens to be great, lovely.
I didn't work much with the Stratus hardware, but reading about it was fascinating. I wish I remembered more of it.
yeah - the big difference was Tandem was software (+ hardware) fault tolerant while Stratus was full hardware level fault tolerant. This gave Tandem a real price edge.
Both were really popular with banks and brokerage houses (back when I worked with stratus at brokerages, HFT was just emerging and down time was umm... frowned upon :-D
The were Awesome machines - don't let those filthy hobbitsis...err..tandem users cloud your judgement. Stratus was pure hardware FT, and tandem... wasn't :-P
Vos was pretty nice too - decent macro language - not all the utils you expect with a unix box, but in terms of the core OS and shell it was pretty good machine .. 40 years later I still love those machines and the career they helped get me into :-D