Bruce Layne wrote: > On 07/19/2013 11:59 PM, Jon Elson wrote: > >> My old microVAX is right next to me, it was SUCH a hot machine in 1986 when >> I got it. >> > > MicroVAX? Ha! I had a VAX 11/780 system in my suburban living room. I > rescued it from a local hospital that was going to be forced to pay > $6000 to have it hauled away as toxic scrap, before commodity prices > went insane and the thriving metals recycling market emerged. > > The VAX occupied almost my entire living room, including the CPU, line > printer, control console and the two hard disk drives (each of which was > larger than a commercial clothes washer and could store a whopping 256 > Mb of data. > > I was forced to dispose of the VAX a few years later as a requirement of > getting married. > Well, my MicroVAX II was bought as a new board from a broker in 1986, and ran for 21 or so years, and still works. The backplane got flaky, and finally the hard drive quit. When I got it, it was awesome, so far ahead of the crummy PCs at the time. But, the PCs eventually surpassed it.
But, for crazy stuff, a friend of mine actually bought a PAIR of 370/145's. I bought the memory box from one of them, and was planning on using it with a bit-slice computer of my own design. But, software development for that system was going to be a SLOW process. So, eventually, the MicroVAX ended up in the memory cabinet. Here are some pictures of it. http://fp1.centurytel.net/gklittle/ibm370.htm (The pic that says I am in it is wrong, that is another friend with much darker hair.) The memory cabinet shown is like the one I put the Vax into. The 780 you could at least in theory run on a residential service, the 370/145 needed a 17 KVA motor generator set. Jon ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ See everything from the browser to the database with AppDynamics Get end-to-end visibility with application monitoring from AppDynamics Isolate bottlenecks and diagnose root cause in seconds. Start your free trial of AppDynamics Pro today! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=48808831&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
