30 Apr
2005
30 Apr
'05
1:50 p.m.
>>>> "witchy" == witchy
<witchy at binarydinosaurs.co.uk> writes:
>> Do you have an idea how many VAX9000s were
sold? I remember the
>> mags of the day full of pictures of a thoughtful tech staring at
>> one of the CPU modules, quite possibly thinking 'this costs
>> WAAAAAY too much money' :)
> I googled a while ago. People said that 454 were sold.
witchy> That's more than I expected actually. I wonder how many are
witchy> left......and how many ex digits have one in their garage :)
It's a nice powerful machine. One of its problems was that it was
originally planned as a water-cooled machine (code name "aquarius").
That ended up being impractical, so plan B was to do an air cooled
somewhat slowed down version (code name "aridus" :-) ).
So a bunch of the technology was done on the assumption that power
density could be very high and speed would be the maximum possible at
that time. Also, I think it was the only VAX ever shipped out of the
"large systems group" which used to be the PDP-10 group before the
last PDP-10 project got nuked halfway through its development.
paul