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

[David Froble]

Doug Phillips wrote:
> 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!)
> 

The MicroVAX II in the BA-123 box was a big step in moving computing outside the 
"computer room".

In my opinion the MicroVAX 3100 systems was the big step.  Easy enough to carry 
around.  No special power requirements.  And the biggest step, SCSI device 
support.  It opened the door wide for commodity disks.

The last of the line, the MicroVAX 3100 Model 98 even got rid of the flat box 
and placed all the components into what was almost a commodity mid-tower 
computer case.  The SCSI controller could have been better and cheaper, but hey, 
it was DEC, and they never seemed able to grasp the "commodity" concept.