It's good to hear that the VAX was a cost-effective solution - there are too many stories about how expensive DEC gear was, but I imagine they primarily came after PCs started dropping in price.
On 9 February 2016 at 04:50, Ethan Dicks <[email protected]> wrote: > On Mon, Feb 8, 2016 at 11:11 PM, william degnan <[email protected]> > wrote: > > I ran my VAX 4000-200 all day today. > > Nice. > > > I have never worked with an older > > I happened to get a lot of opportunity in the 80s to work with VAXen, > then Alphas in the 90s and a little beyond (I haven't been paid to run > VMS since about 2003). > > > VAX. I run VMS 6.2 Today I booted off the backup drive to keep it > > fresh, DIA5. I am running MULTINET. > > Nice. We never had Ethernet back in the day - everything was async > lines (and Kermit and BLAST) and sync lines (HASP, 3780 and SNA via > our own products, plus DDCMP on DEC sync serial interfaces and a > point-to-point DECnet network) > > > 3 M7622 16MB RAM boards installed. :-) > > I never had more than 8MB on a big VAX or 9MB on a MicroVAX. I had to > go to Alphas to get that much RAM (and then, boy, did you need it!) > With 8-20 users on 9600 bps terminals, 8MB was a little pinched at > times, but mostly OK. It kinda hurt first thing in the morning when > everyone was in VMS MAIL and soaking up a bunch of RAM, but unless we > had half our users in MAIL, a quarter of our users in business apps > like Access 20/20 (spreadsheets) or MASS-11 (word processor) _and_ > someone kicking off a build with Whitesmith's C, we didn't swap much. > All this power for under $5,000 per user, terminal included, years > before $5,000 would buy you an IBM 5170 PC-AT. > > -ethan >
