[Info-vax] VAX 6000 on Young Sheldon

[Scott Dorsey]

Clark G  <clarkm.geimsler at ieeemmm.org> wrote:
>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.

The difference in floating point performance between a straight 11/780 and
a Sparcstation I was absolutely staggering.  I couldn't believe how much
faster the Sparc was, and it cost less to buy than the Vax cost to maintain
for three months.

But it's true that you could hang a vector machine like the Floating Point
Systems array processors on the side of the vax and it made things much less
painful (if your code could be adapted for it).
--scott
-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."