[Info-vax] VAX 6000 on Young Sheldon

[Clark G]

Arne Vajhøj <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote in
news:trjqsr$1io8j$1 at dont-email.me: 

> On 2/3/2023 3:22 PM, Neil Rieck wrote:
>> 
>> 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

A friend of mine ran a geo-physical data processing company in Calgary. I 
visited his office around 1990 and they had the VAX 11/780 they had 
started with still running and they had started with some vector 
processing hardware attached to the 780. By then they were using high 
powered workstations for the number crunching and the 780 was just used 
for reading the raw data from the 9 track tapes the customers sent them.

-- 
Clark G
* take away the em's to reply