[Info-vax] Reading Gordon Bell's VAX strategy document

[Chris Townley]

On 24/09/2023 17:09, John Dallman wrote:
> In article <ueph3e$lj1$1 at news.misty.com>, bqt at softjar.se (Johnny
> Billquist) wrote:
> 
>> What you could possibly argue was that DEC didn't enough see or
>> anticipate the drop in price of memory, which would lead to totally
>> different constraints and optimal points.
> 
> Indeed. Nor did they look at the history of the art of making computers
> faster. The VAX architecture was implemented readily enough at first, but
> made pipelining, out-of-order and other ideas that had been invented in
> the 1950s and 1960s hard to add.
> 
>> VMS was never expected to run on something with 64K. You couldn't
>> even run a reasonable PDP-11 on that little memory at that point.
>> (I said responable, for anyone dragging out a minimal RT-11 system.)
> 
> I agree it seems crazy, but that's what the paper says, on page 14:
> 
>    . . . a range of 64 Kbytes of RAM and ROM for VMS in the terminal
>    to as much as 32 Mbytes in the large configuration . . .
> 
> John

My first Vax (after PDP 11/44) was 8530 with a massive 32Mb, and 3 off 
428Mb disks

hat handles 60 to 80 production users, 2 test systems (not my idea) and 
a backup for our Central Ingres set up!

It was still way faster than the old PDP

-- 
Chris