Looking for a small fast VAX development machine

[Richard Loken]

On Sun, 21 Feb 2016, Jon Elson wrote:
> On 02/21/2016 07:21 PM, Jay West wrote:
...
>> I'm not familiar with those type of machines, is that fast enough to play 
>> around with? J 
...
> You would not want to go web browsing on a MicroVAX, even though the 3100 is 
> quite a bit faster than my MicroVAX-II.  Moving files around on the net, 
> email and such things might not be so obviously slow.  I wouldn't want to do 
> any real computing on and VAX system, I'm just spoiled by what a typical 
> machine can do now.

I used to do web browsing on a VAXstation 3100 and I stopped because 
whatever version of the browser I could use with VMS 5.5-1 crashed when 
presented with a monochrome monitor.  (That is totally wierd).

That being said, there is no doubt that browser became resource hogs many 
years ago, I always ran old junk that I pulled out of the scrap pile at 
work and I retired my 75MHz pentium running Linux because the web browser 
became too slow.  I also stopped web browsing om my Alphaserver 4100
because it was a total pig.

What is real computing?  Email, writing documents, balancing your cheque
book, compiling small applications do not require 2GHz CPUs and 32G of
memory.  Computer games require all you can give them but that is not
computing.  Your app is a pig?  Write it in something other than Java
or python.

It seems that compiling some big applications (like firefox or open 
office) is pure misery no matter how much cpu, memory, and disk may be 
available - This becomes very true on VMS (my favourite OS is a pig).

My buddy Ross measures speed by how long it take to build world on FreeBSD
but I haven't built the world on FreeBSD in over five years so I don't
care how long it takes.

-- 
   Richard Loken VE6BSV, Systems Programmer - VMS   : "...underneath those
   Athabasca University				   : tuques we wear, our
   Athabasca, Alberta Canada			   : heads are naked!"
   ** rlloken at telus.net **                         :    - Arthur Black