VAXen and minimal memory (was Re: The PDP11/04 has landed..)

On Mon, Feb 8, 2016 at 11:11 PM, william degnan <billdegnan at gmail.com> wrote: Nice. 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). 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) 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