11/782 (was: Any own an 11/725...?)

Patrick Finnegan wrote: I remember reading the paper describing Purdue's VAX and it was definitely home-brew in the sense that they bought bits and built something. So I'm not surprised that DEC never sold it. I can find no evidence that DEC ever sold a VAX-11/784 (or any quad processor VAX-11/780). I don't doubt that someone might have cobbled something together in a lab on a rainy day (there were enough DEC research labs gluing stuff together to see what happened!), but I see no evidence that anything like that was ever done for a customer. All the stuff I see on the net is just "not many people know..." type of stuff with no credible sources (actually, mostly no sources whatsoever). I know that there were "VAXen that never shipped" and I might be able to remember the names of some of them if pushed (Raven, for one). But I never heard even a whispering of such a VAX while inside DEC and there is nothing that says "784" in the Options & Modules List (except for a raft of power supplies, some Mxxx[x] boards and some DECmate bits). Admittedly the only non-scanned searchable-text one I have is from 1994, but it still has the VAX-11/780 and a boatload of PDP-11s in there, so it would be odd if the mythical VAX-11/784 dropped off by accident. So unless someone digs out some evidence, I'll just choose not to believe that DEC ever built a 784 (and after building the 782, I cannot believe that they would have even tried :-)). One of the VAX handbooks does have a section in the back that suggests using butterfly configs of VAX-11/780s with dual-ported memory to perform FFTs and the like. No suggestion that such a config would be sold as anything other than individual VAXen and associated memory boxes. I do know that some fool somewhere went and gave names to groups of clustered nautilus VAXes and (IIRC) someone else went and repeated the mistake for at least one config of VAXft machines, but at least they had the decency to produce glossy brochures so we could see how confused they were trying to make us :-) Antonio -- Antonio carlini arcarlini at iee.org