[fl7305]

> 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.

[kjs3]

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.

[fl7305]

> 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.

[I_am_uncreative]

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