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by kjs3 810 days ago
A 750 was a nice 'personal computer' in 1987 (I ran 3 of them in that year, along with a 780 and a bunch of different microVaxen/Vaxstations) especially if you had plenty of memory (8MB was comfy, 14MB max). CPU wasn't so fast (less than 1MIP), but I/O was well engineered and well matched so it 'felt' responsive. It was reasonably fast with 1 user, not terrible up to maybe 3-4 power users and significantly more just doing email/text processing/etc. And the CPU only weighed about 100lbs (without rack & disks)!

The 784 was more capable (with caveats), but 1) only a handful were ever built (less than 10?), and 2) it was huge, both in physical size and power consumption (it's basically 4 x 11/780s with a custom interconnect cabinet). And as I understand not terribly reliable. You might be thinking of the 785, which was an improved 780, so it was still big and power hungry, but lots more were built.
1 comments
fl7305 810 days ago
> You might be thinking of the 785

Yes, I wrote that wrong. I initially checked the VAX wikipedia page and thought 784 looked familiar. But I'm pretty sure it was a 785 now that you remind me.

> I/O was well engineered and well matched so it 'felt' responsive

Yeah, I remember back then how Dhrystones were pretty misleading when comparing things like a VAX 11/780 and a barebones 68000 system.

It was interesting working on VAXes. They had really good documentation (10 shelf-feet of orange binders :), and I liked the ";n" automatic file versioning. But having a personal Sun workstation with X11 was so much nicer, and Unix felt much more natural.

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kjs3 809 days ago
Dhrystones were pretty misleading

Yeah...always good for a laugh. Sure, your 68k can compute a Sieve of Eratosthenes 3 times faster than my 780 (or whatever)...but no 68k alive (at the time) could support 50+ interactive terminal users like we did all day every day (and provide email, netnews, ftp, etc. for the whole campus).

DEC VMS is indeed very nice, but we didn't run it. We ran a locally hacked version of BSD 4.2/4.3. At some point I got upgraded to a Sun 3/160 on my desk (well...next to it) so I hear you.

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fl7305 809 days ago
> At some point I got upgraded to a Sun 3/160 on my desk

I was going to say that it was a nice thing to have fall into your lap, but considering that it weighed 100 kg, maybe not.

I got started with a Sun 3/50 when it was a few years old. It was slow, but surprisingly usable as an X11 development machine for C programming.

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I_am_uncreative 809 days ago
It's hilarious how today we have a variant of this same argument with desktop vs. mobile CPUs.
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