Looking for a small fast VAX development machine

Jerome H. Fine wrote:

That sounds like a good idea to use SimH for the VAXstation. However, I suspect that E11 (Ersatz-11) would be a bit difficult to use to emulate a VAXstation since E11 is exclusively for the PDP-11. As for the individual who mentioned the speed of an emulator, I have used both SimH and Ersatz-11 on a 750 MHz Pentium III. SimH probably runs at about the speed of a PDP-11/93, probably even faster. However, Ersatz-11 runs 15 times as fast for CPU speed and about 100 times as fast for hard disk I/O. On a 2.83 GHz Q9550, Ersatz-11 ran about 100 times the speed of a PDP-11/93 for the CPU and hard disk I/O was probably about 200 times as fast. As just one example, on a real DEC PDP-11/93 with ESDI hard drives, it took about 4 minutes to copy about 32 MB from one physical hard drive to a different physical hard drive. On the Q9550, it took less than 1 second. I was using RT-11 in all cases. I would assume that an I7 CPU would be somewhat faster, but maybe someone else has some benchmarks.