[Info-vax] VAX 6000 on Young Sheldon

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 2/5/2023 11:05 AM, Slo wrote:
> John Updike's "Roger's version" (1986). I have these passages highlighted
>   in my copy, I used to be so impressed:
> 
> “‘I’d be happy to tutor him, if we can find a time. My hours are kind of
> funny, with the time-sharing and all. For my graphics I have to split a
> VAX 8600 with a girl doing pattern recognitions.”
> 
> The sixth floor holds the guts of the place — the massed ranks of
> CPUs — VAX 785s, Symbolics 3600 LISP machines, and the Cube’s own design,
> the MU—churning and crunching
> 
> Like Dale with his animation graphics, Amy needs to use the Venus, the
> VAX 8600, which costs four hundred thousand dollars; to have undivided
> access to the machine, he and she must schedule away from each other.
> 
> The phantom configuration’s anatomy, fitted into the ambiguous three
> dimensions of the tortured, abstract pattern, appears complete to Dale;
> he believes that, with higher resolving power than the VAX 8600 can summon,
> knuckles and even fingernails and cuticles would emerge, just as the
> tendrilous graphics of a Mandelbrot set can be infinitely enhanced.
> 
> Greedily, impatiently, his fingertips ask the VAX 8600 to repeat
> its gigantic loop once more.

Where I was at the time the 8600 was replace by / upgraded to a 8650.

It was very fast compared to everything else around. But it was not
without complications. The RA81 disks went bad all the time (the
RA82 disks was better). Once they replaced a board in the system
and it became unstable - they replaced another board and it was
still unstable - replaced a third board still unstable - put
back all the old boards and it worked again.

Arne