[Info-vax] VAX 6000 on Young Sheldon

[Scott Dorsey]

bill  <bill.gunshannon at gmail.com> wrote:
>On 2/7/2023 5:35 PM, Scott Dorsey wrote:
>> gah4  <gah4 at u.washington.edu> wrote:
>>> The 360/30 is a little bigger, and might not have that.
>>>
>>> Some will question exactly how big one has to be to be a real mainframe.
>>>
>>> And VAX were some that had that asked of them.  Even in the beginning.
>> 
>> Being a mainframe is less about size than about I/O throughput.  The vax
>> was no mainframe.  The DECSYSTEM-20 was a mainframe.  DEC's customers knew
>> the difference even if DEC's marketing people had no clue.
>
>Did anyone other than the DECSYSTEM-20 users think it was or call it a
>mainframe?

IBM guys would not have.  My boss would have said that if it can't back up
the DASDs with the CPU halted than it wasn't a real mainframe.  But guys
doing commercial database stuff would have.  And guys doing scientific
computing would have denegrated it as "another damn mainframe, just an 
I/O machine."
--scott
-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."