[fleeno]

I had access to a VMS system in my BBS days, and I had no idea it wasn't just some hard to use BBS software. When it clicked that it was a real operating system on a giant machine (I believe 11/380) it changed everything for me!

[Suzuran]

There was no 11/380 but there was an 11/780.

[ButlerianJihad]

Apparently, the only place the VAX 380 exists is in a writing sample by Pearson Education. Otherwise, there is no evidence of DEC ever producing something called "VAX 380".

https://www.pearsonhighered.com/assets/samplechapter/0/2/0/5...

[Suzuran]

It looks entirely made up because the procedure described is also entirely alien to me, and I had professional experience with both VMS and Ultrix when they were still supported by DEC. (And it's certainly not BSD...)

[fleeno]

I know I just made it up! I have an 11/23+ and I'm guessing I was thinking of that 3!

[Suzuran]

Could be. You could also have been thinking of the 11/730, which was a cost-reduced 11/750 and thus the second-slowest VAX model DEC ever sold.

The slowest would be the 11/725, which was a cost-reduced 11/730 that had a reduced clock speed and half of the bus slots filled with epoxy to limit expansion. The 11/725 was so slow that using it was an act of masochism; It was slower than your 11/23+.

Those models were pretty rare though. Even though they were cheaper than an 11/750 the performance drop from the 750 to the 730 was too severe to justify even the reduced cost. If that were all then maybe replacing PDP-11s being used in industrial applications might have saved it but the 730 was still too expensive versus the existing PDP-11 products, and the 725's limited expansion made it less attractive than those same PDP-11 products. The PDP-11 thus outlived both the 725 and the 730.