[Info-vax] W: VMS Alpha V7.2 for Multia/UDB installation media

[Paul Sture]

On Mon, 30 Jan 2012 08:34:20 -0600, Bob Koehler wrote:

>   The very first, smallest Alpha I bought, came with a minumum of 64 MB.
>    Much less than half of that was used for VMS and out 500KB programs
>    didn't exactly stress the rest.
> 
>    But when we started running mozilla on it, we ran out and bought a
>    256MB upgrade.

My PWS400au at work had 128MB and starting CDE was an excuse to visit the 
coffee machine.  Once up it was fine though.  Netscape ran OK, but when 
Mozilla came along I ran that from a server with 2GB or more.

By contrast my PWS600au at home had 512MB and CDE started up in a 
fraction of the time.  I still had to up process quotas considerably to 
get Mozilla running on that.

>    I once had access to an 11/780 with 1/2 MB RAM running VAX-11/VMS
>    1.x. It was the smallest configuration DEC would sell.  It seems to
>    run just fine, but at tha time I had no concept of watching for hard
>    page faults to see just how well it was doing.
> 
>    When it came to crunching numbers, it would not keep up with our SEL
>    32/55, but the fact that we didn't have an FPA was probably quite
>    significant.
> 
>    No, I don't think any recent version of VMS would run worth a damn in
>    1/2 MB.

When I upgraded a customer 11/780 from V3.4 to V4.2 it was unacceptably 
slow, so we raided the on site spares kit to upgrade it from 4MB to 8MB 
and get the performance back.

-- 
Paul Sture