[Info-vax] How things have changed (was Re: VMS 8.4-2L1 on AXPBox)

[Phillip Helbig undress to reply]

In article <85a1ebc7-8eff-577a-8578-7c30886aa69a at goatley.com>, Hunter
Goatley <goathunter at goatley.com> writes: 

> When I first started working for Clyde Digital Systems in February 1987, 
> I was surprised to see several bookcases full of science fiction and 
> fantasy novels scattered around the programmers' area.
> 
> I understood why when I learned that the six developers were all using 
> one VAX 11/730 for all development work. The 11/730 was painful for a 
> single user, but multiple builds? The guys would start a build, then 
> kick back with a novel and read for an hour or two.
> 
> I couldn't handle that for long, so I started---without 
> permission---using the company's business-side VAX 11/750 for my 
> development work. That flew by comparison, but was still a far cry from 
> the VAX 11/785 I had been used to using at WKU.

Calculations I used to do in an overnight batch job on a VAXstation 3100 
I now do interactively on a DS10.  But other things I now do in 
week-long batch jobs on the DS10, though they would be maybe an hour on 
Itanium and perhaps on x86 I could do those interactively as well.

Yesterday while cleaning up around the house I found an add for a 15 MB
disk drive for $2000 or something, and another, somewhat newer, for a 60
MB disk drive "for when 30 MB just isn't enough" for about $3500.  True,
that was before my computing time, but not much more than 20 years ago I
bought a 4-GB disk for about $400.  Now a GB costs about 10¢.  A GB of 
RAM will cost more, but much cheaper than the DM 100 per MB we 
calculated about 25 years ago.