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

[Doug Phillips]

On 8/15/2012 6:16 PM, David Froble wrote:
> 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.
>

Agreed. I still have a MV3100-40 running Pathworks on my home network. 
Way back when, I wanted a CD reader so I went to the local (CompUSA, I 
think) and bought a Philips PC80SCE drive that they had on the shelf. I 
plugged it in and it worked (amazing!).

> 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.

The 3100's were good sellers until the Alpha came along.

A search on c.o.v. or the net for discussions about the things DEC never 
seemed to grasp could easily burn a few reading-days.