[Info-vax] VAX 6000 on Young Sheldon

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 2/3/2023 3:22 PM, Neil Rieck wrote:
> On Friday, February 3, 2023 at 11:24:21 AM UTC-5, Roy Omond wrote:
>> On 03/02/2023 14:01, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>>> On 2/3/2023 8:48 AM, Neil Rieck wrote:
>>>> Don't know how many people here watch "Young Sheldon" which is a
>>>> spinoff of "The Big Bang Theory". Anyway, last night we see Sheldon
>>>> Cooper take delivery of a main frame in his dorm. What got rolled in
>>>> was a VAX-6000-420 with three racks of disk storage. I guess Chuck
>>>> Lorre and staff didn't know this was a mini (or perhaps they did but
>>>> just liked the sound of Sheldon say "I need a mainframe")
>>>
>>> Ah memories.
>>>
>>> End of 80's I worked on a 6000-420. We could have 110 interactive
>>> users on that system.
>> Memories indeed. The 6000-4n0 was the lower-end system to support
>> vector processors (the other one was, of course, the VAX 9000).
>>
>> Managed both of these in the early 1990s in Heidelberg at the
>> European Molecular Biology Laboratory.
>>
>> P.s. I have no idea who "Sheldon Cooper" is.
> 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheldon_Cooper
> 
> VAX-6000 was the Chevy of minicomputers in the 1990s.
> 
> IIRC, Vector processing was only available if you purchased the optional vector processing board (I saw one once at DEC in Bedford Mass.)
> https://manx-docs.org/collections/mds-199909/cd1/vax/60vaapg1.pdf

Yes - it was HW addon.

I don't think it sold that well. Those RISC thingies was
starting to pop up everywhere.

But the 6000 series sold pretty well and I think a lot of them
kept running well up in the 00's. They were pretty
good systems - especially the 400 and later.

Unlike the 9000's which is think mostly had a short
career in the data center.

Arne