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

[Richard Loken]

On Sun, 17 Jul 2016, 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.

You certainly got more bang when your disk crashed.  I ran a VAX cluster 
with 15 years with shadowed DSSI drives and never had a disk corruption, I 
replaced members of shadow sets when they died but again I never had any 
issues of corruption and data loss.  Meanwhile I also lived with an array 
of Ultrix boxes and SunOS boxes where I had to clean up disk corruptions 
or do restores from tape onto new disks - usually in the middle of the 
night.  Your work is always done faster if you skip steps.

 	"System unstable, save often."

-- 
   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