11/785 on ebay (2018) - was Re: VAX 780 on eBay

[Wayne S]

We had 780,785 and 8600.
785 was noticeably faster than the 780, but the 8600 didn’t appear that much faster than the 785.
It was probably due to a disk bound workload and having Slower Fujitsu Eagle disks.
I think that a lot of people traded in their 78x for a 8600 so that might have skewed the sales results so the phrase “best selling computer” might have to be taken with a grain of salt.
Dec was starting to have management issues when the 8600 came out and also  spending a lot of resources (and getting into more trouble) trying to poach IBM’s corporate customers by offering their Vax 9000. As a result, the sales of 8600 and other lower vaxen tailed off.

We had @25 programmers doing development on the Vax 750 with Rm05 disks, @35 remote users doing inquiries and data entry on each of the 780 and 785. That was considered a lot of users back then 1981-1987.

Sent from my iPhone

> On Jan 3, 2022, at 09:11, Jon Elson via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
> On 1/3/22 9:16 AM, emanuel stiebler via cctalk wrote:
>>> On 2022-01-03 08:54, Noel Chiappa via cctalk wrote:
>>> 
>>> Not too surprising; the /780 and /785 are basically the same machine. (In
>>> fact, one could convert a /780 to a /785 by pulling out the /780 CPU cards
>>> and replacing them with a set of /785 cards; basically the same cards, with
>>> the 74S chips replaced with 74AS.)
>> 
>> There should be more /785s out there than plain /780...
>> IIRC, most /780 were upgraded, as the "old" /780 had some EMC issues
>> in the field? Am I dreaming this up?
> 
> We had two /780's I was partially responsible for.  we never had EMC trouble with them, they were really ROCK solid machines. These were not the first 780 machines made, they were delivered in about 1980 and 1982-3.  Neither were ever upgraded to /785.
> 
> Jon
>