Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!nrl-cmf!ames!amdahl!rtech!mtxinu!taniwha!paul
From: paul@taniwha.UUCP (Paul Campbell)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: In defense of the VAX
Message-ID: <324@taniwha.UUCP>
Date: 23 Feb 89 19:01:01 GMT
References: <11037@tekecs.TEK.COM> <76700073@p.cs.uiuc.edu>
Reply-To: paul@taniwha.UUCP (Paul Campbell)
Organization: Taniwha Systems Design, Oakland
Lines: 32

In article <76700073@p.cs.uiuc.edu> gillies@p.cs.uiuc.edu writes:
>5.  The VAX was made to sell in 1978.  Ok, Flame ON!  Have you GOT ANY
>FRIGGING IDEA HOW EXPENSIVE MEMORY WAS IN 1978????  PEOPLE NEEDED TO
>USE IT IN 1978, OK???  CAN YOU PARSE THAT????  Flame off.  Other
>companies in 1978 (Xerox), full of smart people, were architecting
>machines under the same assumptions as the VAX, and came up with
>worse/more restricted results (DLions).

Hear! hear! about that time we bought 1Mb for our Burroughs 6700. It cost
$500,000 (I think we . It was core, Burroughs were selling the new
semiconductor stuff for more!! It wasn't that much earlier that large chunks
of semiconductor memory were becoming cost effective for us mere mortals.
When the Vax came out it had 16k chips. Each of those BIG (2ft wide?) boards
held 256kx32, the 8 slots in the controller held 2Mb! (of course we all
had to replace the controllers with 64k controllers a year or two later :-).
These days I can buy a Mac SIM (1Mbx8) which has the same capacity but is
about 1/2inchx5inches it's easy to forget how much things have changed
so quickly! All along people have being saying something like "I don't
see how I could really use N bytes of memory N/4 seems enough for me ....".

>5.  The VAX was AMAZING when it came out.  It created the "supermini"
>class of machine, as the first such computer from a major manufacturer
>(sorry, Gould / Perkin-Elmer).  How quickly we forget all this...

6(?7). The VAX moved Unix out to a much larger audience (thanks BSD :-)

	Paul
-- 
Paul Campbell			..!{unisoft|mtxinu}!taniwha!paul (415)420-8179
Taniwha Systems Design, Oakland CA

    "Read my lips .... no GNU taxes" - as if they could tax free software