[Info-vax] Attaching an actual 3.5" floppy drive to SIMH-VAX RXV21 device?

[Doug Phillips]

On 8/15/2012 9:57 AM, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> On 2012-08-15 14:40:22 +0000, Doug Phillips said:
>
>> I always figured that the MicroVAX I was just a proof of concept that
>> DEC shouldn't have put on the market but decided 'what the heck, let's
>> see if we can sell a few and recoup some R&D.' Compared to its
>> contemporaries it performed like a snail on tranquilizers.
>
> The MicroVAX I and VAXstation I series wwere comparable to the
> VAX-11/725 and VAX-11/730 server performance,

Yes, all were around .3 vups if I recall. All were dogs.


> and vastly easier to lift.

:-)


> It was (for its time) a good workstation, and much nicer than competing
> for cycles on a VAX-11/750 or VAX-11/780 box.
> Though if you had the wrong floating point format for however your
> applications were compiled, performance did suffer.
>

No floating point in our apps, just regular old business stuff. Even the 
little PDP's of that time could run circles around any of those boxes 
for our applications, and they cost much less.

Until the MicroVAX II came along, the only market we had for small VAX 
was in engineering departments who didn't have a heavy multi-user need 
but (as you say) needed to off-load their VAX-11/7xx. We didn't sell too 
many of them.

The MVII opened up the market for VMS and we sold a bunch. I don't think 
we ever sold a full PDP-11 business system again after the MVII came 
out. (Look Ma, no more overlays!)