25 Jul
2001
25 Jul
'01
6:47 p.m.
How many VAX-11/78x machines were produced?
These days you expect that thousands of any machine would
be sold (except maybe the specialised supercomputers).
I believe that for the VAX 9000 series, only 400-500 made
it out of the door. The same order of magnitude may well
be true for the VAX-11/78x systems.
You can't base the VAX-11/78x system sales projections on the
VAX 9000 sales. The VAX-11/78x systems were very reliable and
worked well. The VAX 9000 systems weren't and didn't.
--
Eric Dittman
dittman(a)dittman.net
25 Jul
25 Jul
11:02 p.m.
--- Eric Dittman <dittman(a)dittman.net> wrote:
Back in the day when they used to still compare Mainframe sales to Minis
(c. 1984), I remember seeing a number - $300,000,000. It was the amount
sold of a particular class of IBM mainframe and nearly the identical
amount sold of VAX-11/780s. The dollar figures were remarkably close,
especially when it was further evident that it was approximately 100
of the Mainframes and 1,000 of the VAX-11/780s. Those numbers were
probably the peak in annual sales of specifically the 11/780, but it
is a ballpark - I'd estimate the total sales between 2K and 5K, not
including 11/785s. They probably didn't sell as many of those, since
most customers did not require dual processors and SMP didn't emerge
until 1988 with VMS 5.0, long after the 11/780 was being sold as new.
I did see osu-eddie, an 11/780 running some flavor of BSD, once the
machine through which all Columbus UUCP traffic flowed, at the university
surplus. This was more than 10 years ago, and I think it went for $200.
A local reseller bought it, stripped it and I saw the carcass in the
dumpster the next month. :-( That was the last 11/780 I saw in the wild.
-ethan
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How many
VAX-11/78x machines were produced?
These days you expect that thousands of any machine would
be sold (except maybe the specialised supercomputers).
I believe that for the VAX 9000 series, only 400-500 made
it out of the door. The same order of magnitude may well
be true for the VAX-11/78x systems.
You can't base the VAX-11/78x system sales projections on the
VAX 9000 sales. The VAX-11/78x systems were very reliable and
worked well. The VAX 9000 systems weren't and didn't. 
26 Jul
26 Jul
6:44 a.m.
The dollar figures were remarkably close,
especially when it was further evident that it was approximately 100
of the Mainframes and 1,000 of the VAX-11/780s. Those numbers were
probably the peak in annual sales of specifically the 11/780, but it
is a ballpark - I'd estimate the total sales between 2K and 5K, not
including 11/785s. They probably didn't sell as many of those, since
most customers did not require dual processors and SMP didn't emerge
until 1988 with VMS 5.0, long after the 11/780 was being sold as new.
-ethan
The 11/785's were not SMP... they were (IIRC) a fast schottky
rework of the 11/780's ttl which was about 1.5 times an 11/780.
The 11/782 was dual cpu 11/780's with shared memory bus run
master-slave for compute bound tasks with the i/o run off of one
cpu.
The 11/787 was similar with dual 11/785's on the multiport memory.
I was told the 11/785 was done in DEC Europe as a mid life kicker for
the 11/780 when the Venus 11/790 -- er 11/860 -- er 8600 was VERY LATE
getting built.
Bill
---
Bill Gates is a Persian cat and a monocle away from being a
villain in a James Bond movie -- Dennis Miller
bpechter@shell.monmouth.com|pechter@pechter.dyndns.org
9:02 a.m.
--- Bill Pechter <pechter(a)bg-tc-ppp1660.monmouth.com> wrote:
I wrote:
Does SMP have a meaning in this context besides Symmetric Multi-Processing?
What I meant by my comment was that with VMS versions prior to 5.0, if you
had multiple processors, one was "master" and could go into kernel mode,
the other were slaves and never went into kernel mode. I had to update
our COMBOARD drivers in 1988 to handle the extra level of spin-locking
required of all privileged code to accomodate the fact that more than one
CPU might be attempting to access systems structures at the same time.
This has nothing to do with the logic family used to implement a processor.
...most
customers did not require dual processors and SMP didn't emerge
until 1988 with VMS 5.0, long after the 11/780 was being sold as new.
-ethan
The 11/785's were not SMP... they were (IIRC) a fast schottky
rework of the 11/780's ttl which was about 1.5 times an 11/780. The 11/782 was dual cpu 11/780's with shared
memory bus run
master-slave for compute bound tasks with the i/o run off of one
cpu.
Right. Developed by George Goble (of the LOX-on-the-BBQ fame), et. al, at
Purdue, IIRC.
The 11/787 was similar with dual 11/785's on the
multiport memory.
Never saw one of those.
I was told the 11/785 was done in DEC Europe as a mid
life kicker for
the 11/780 when the Venus 11/790 -- er 11/860 -- er 8600 was VERY LATE
getting built.
Bill
My understanding was that the 11/785 was DEC's official implementation
of what George and crew cobbled together as the 11/782. It only saw
the light of day because, as you say, there was a gap in DEC's product
line with the delays in the 8600 and customers wanted more than what was
presently out there.
Disclaimer: when this stuff was current, we had a couple of 11/750s and
an 11/730 at work. I never got to dig in the guts of an 11/780, so only
parts of this is from personal experience.
-ethan
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11:52 a.m.
I was told the
11/785 was done in DEC Europe as a mid life kicker for
the 11/780 when the Venus 11/790 -- er 11/860 -- er 8600 was VERY LATE
getting built.
Bill
My understanding was that the 11/785 was DEC's official implementation
of what George and crew cobbled together as the 11/782. It only saw
the light of day because, as you say, there was a gap in DEC's product
line with the delays in the 8600 and customers wanted more than what was
presently out there.
-ethan
8560
days inactive
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dittman＠dittman.net -
ethan_dicks＠yahoo.com -
pechter＠bg-tc-ppp1660.monmouth.com -
pechter＠bg-tc-ppp499.monmouth.com