VMS stability back in the day (was Re: NuTek Mac comes)

[Steven M Jones]

On 07/16/2016 15:21, steven at malikoff.com wrote:
> 
> In the mid 80s our Uni teaching 11/780 running VMS would groan and creak
> under the strain of 50 students logged on. I was told that over at Sydney
> Uni, their 11/780s were running a very modded and tweaked Unix and could
> have a hundred or more students logged in on the one machine. Whether it
> was crashy or not, they got more bang-for-buck out of their VAXen.

That's a tough example to generalize without knowing more about the
workloads involved. I've certainly heard many anecdotes where a given
model running VMS supported many more users than the same hardware
running Ultrix/4BSD, *and* vice versa.

But these examples can easily turn out to be skewed - having a ton of
users running ALL-IN-1, MAIL, or NOTES-11 doesn't compare well to users
compiling code, running SAS or SPSS, or doing database work. Substitute
rn/trn, Mail, cc/f77, ingres, etc as needed. ;)

--S.