Allison J Parent wrote: No, FDDI is about 100 megabits per second. And it is fairly complex, typically requiring more host processing than Ethernet, so usually a cheap 100-base-T card on a PC will match or outperform the throughput. Only in very contrived cases that rarely (if every) occur in the real world is FDDI a win. So why was FDDI around at all? Simply because 100 megabit Ethernet hadn't yet been developed. FDDI cards were available for PC at about the same time as they were for VAXen, so this certainly doesn't help prove that a VAX can outperform a PC. Gigabit ethernet cards for PCs actually showed up *before* such cards for minicomputers. In fact, this phenomena is exactly why most minicomputers now support PCI. Backplane busses yes. But not any common peripheral or network interfaces that were used on VAXen in the late 1980s. Just as most VAXen had a memory interconnect that was faster than their I/O and network interfaces, so did the 486 PCs. This argument is another red herring that does not prove that a VAX outperforms a PC. As far as peripheral and network interfaces go, almost all of the very high-speed stuff is serial (electrical or optical), with the seriously high-speed stuff using parallel optical. Personally I'm getting tired of the type of rants about how PCs have such terrible I/O bandwidth and that any old 360/30 from 1965 could whup their ass because the 360 had I/O channels. Fact is, the cheapest PCs you can buy today have better I/O bandwidth to disks and networks than all but the highest performance mainframes of the 1980s. So why are modern PCs barely adequate to serve a single user, whereas 1960s-era mainframes that were hundreds of times slower could serve hundreds of users? Simple. The type of software that was run on the mainframes was MUCH different than what we run on PCs. If you ported the OS and applications from a 1960s mainframe to a suitably equipped modern PC (and I'm not talking about a $500 special, but a PC with a serious disk system), the PC would outperform it by the hundreds of times that you would expect. Similarly, as Mike Cheponis pointed out, a good 486 box WILL outperform a VAX 8650, if you run equivalent software on it. The 486 box has not just more CPU, but also more I/O bandwidth. Note that Mike did NOT say that about the VAX 6000. He was comparing to the 8650 because the benchmark figures were handy. Mark Green <mark(a)cs.ualberta.ca> wrote: Yes, that's true, but when the difference is very large, you can't just handwave it away by claiming that benchmarks are no good. Even if the dhrystone benchmark totally sucks, the fact that the 486DX2/66 outperforms the VAX 8650 by a factor of five is too large a difference to sweep under the carpet by saying that the VAX isn't good at dhrystones. Personally, the reason I have negligible interest in a VAX 6000 has nothing to do with performance. If I was concerned about absolute performance, I wouldn't be collecting PDP-8s and 11s. In my view, almost all VAXen but the 780 and 785 are completely uninteresting because they are full of custom parts that can neither be repaired if they break, or studied and understood.