> On Feb 11, 2016, at 2:48 PM, Rich Alderson <ri...@livingcomputermuseum.org>
> wrote:
>
> From: Jerome H. Fine
> Sent: Thursday, February 11, 2016 8:56 AM
>
>>> Jon Elson wrote:
>
>>> We paid somewhere between 200 and 250K for our first 11/780. We had
>>> an RM05 and a TU77, and 256 KB of memory. It was a pretty basic
>>> system, but ran rings around the campus 360/65 system. We also had a
>>> pair of 370/145's that were an expensive joke. (The 360/65 ran rings
>>> around BOTH of them. They ran time sharing on them, limited to 4
>>> users/machine. We often had 8+ users plus batch jobs running on our
>>> 780.)
>
>> Any idea about the date of when VMS could do that with a VAX?
>
> From the very beginning? That is, 25 October 1977?
>
> VMS was built from the get-go as a timesharing operating system with a
> virtual memory architecture. It was not the best of such, nor was the
> hardware done particularly well (a VM system with no Page-Modified bit
> in hardware? seriously???), but it was certainly capable of handling
> that many users (and more, depending on job mix).
Indeed. RSTS/E did better, with less hardware -- 64 users on an 11/70 was no
problem, and earlier on you could run 16 users on an 11/20 (though not all that
comfortably).
paul
