[Info-vax] VAX 6000 on Young Sheldon

[Neil Rieck]

On Friday, February 3, 2023 at 3:30:23 PM UTC-5, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> 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

VAX-6000 was the first time I encountered SMP (symmetric multi processing) on VAX. We were running a 6430 which meant 3 CPUs

Before that I worked for a year on a pair of VAX-8550 configured as a VAXcluster

Our VAX-6430 system felt faster than the pair of clustered VAX-8550

Back in the day, DEC published VUP (Vax Units of Performance) for each new product line compared to VAX-11/780 which had a value of "1"

I recall seeing VUPs numbers for the 8000 series but does anyone have VUP numbers for the 6000 family?

p.s. you are correct about RISC. At this time we were seeing Sun servers everywhere.

Neil Rieck
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
http://neilrieck.net
http://neilrieck.net/OpenVMS.html