4 ms·

That is about the same price as the VAX 11/780 we bought in 1979 (serial number 13) to run CAD/CAM software. I remember the price was around $350K, which includ

That is about the same price as the VAX 11/780 we bought in 1979 (serial number 13) to run CAD/CAM software. I remember the price was around $350K, which included three RM80 drives, a vacuum column 9-track tape drive and giant battery backup. We added third party memory to bring it up to 4MB and a 40 port Emulux serial interface. It was just a few years later that a 16Mhz i386 was as fast as this system.

hga 11y ago
It was just a few years later that a 16Mhz i386 was as fast as this system. Wouldn't that be more like 8 years later? 1986 for the 12MHz release (originally targeted at 16), add at least a year to get up in speed and out in people's hands. And didn't the VAX have a much faster disk system, and few i386's tape backup? BTW, how reliable were your RM80s?
- ratsmack 11y ago
  When you're having a good time a "few years" is pretty short. :-) Our RM80's were trouble free from what I can remember. We had an air conditioned, electrostatic filtered clean room for our systems which also included some PDP11's and PDP11/40's with RL02's and RK07 disk drives. The room had very limited access and you had to wear booties. The only time we lost a drive is when one of the RK07's went crazy, slamming the heads against the hard stops causing the heads to crash onto the disk.
  - hga 11y ago
    From everything I've heard, RK07s were ... subpar. I'm not surprised one failed like that. RL02s were meh, but they worked, the first system I was responsible for had 1 or 2 of them. I asked because the RA81 which was released in 1982 was, in MIT's Project Athena experience, awful, they had some sort of problem with glue, and they were losing 1 a week out of a population of no more than 40 drives (!). But it sounds like they were more careful, more lucky, whatever with the earlier RM80s, which I don't remember hearing anything bad about.
  - linker3000 11y ago
    The company at which I was working purchased a second hand VAX 11/750 system around 1984 and a Digital engineer came in to help us re-commission it. Everything went well until the RM05 (256MB) disk pack performed a random-seek confidence test; it was then that we discovered that its feet had not been screwed down to the floor and the whole unit started to breakdance around the computer room like a deranged washing machine. Two of us leapt at the unit and held it down until the test completed.
    - aswanson 11y ago
      Break dancing humans and RAM. The 80s were awesome.
      - grkvlt 11y ago
        Nope, Disk - That 256MB was spinning platters. At the time you would kill for 256MB of RAM, I guess ;)
    - mirimir 11y ago
      http://everything2.com/title/Hard%20Drive%20Racing http://everything2.com/title/Hard%20Drive%20Racing
kabdib 11y ago
In 1986 or so I did a midnight upgrade of a Vax 11/780's hard drive. It took two people to move a 400MB drive from one Vax to another. No idea how much those cost. I was happy we didn't drop it, because serious injury was quite possible. I often wonder what happened to that Vax. For a couple of years, I was the only person using it. It was glorious.

hga 11y ago

It was just a few years later that a 16Mhz i386 was as fast as this system. Wouldn't that be more like 8 years later? 1986 for the 12MHz release (originally targeted at 16), add at least a year to get up in speed and out in people's hands. And didn't the VAX have a much faster disk system, and few i386's tape backup? BTW, how reliable were your RM80s?

ratsmack 11y ago
When you're having a good time a "few years" is pretty short. :-) Our RM80's were trouble free from what I can remember. We had an air conditioned, electrostatic filtered clean room for our systems which also included some PDP11's and PDP11/40's with RL02's and RK07 disk drives. The room had very limited access and you had to wear booties. The only time we lost a drive is when one of the RK07's went crazy, slamming the heads against the hard stops causing the heads to crash onto the disk.
- hga 11y ago
  From everything I've heard, RK07s were ... subpar. I'm not surprised one failed like that. RL02s were meh, but they worked, the first system I was responsible for had 1 or 2 of them. I asked because the RA81 which was released in 1982 was, in MIT's Project Athena experience, awful, they had some sort of problem with glue, and they were losing 1 a week out of a population of no more than 40 drives (!). But it sounds like they were more careful, more lucky, whatever with the earlier RM80s, which I don't remember hearing anything bad about.
- linker3000 11y ago
  The company at which I was working purchased a second hand VAX 11/750 system around 1984 and a Digital engineer came in to help us re-commission it. Everything went well until the RM05 (256MB) disk pack performed a random-seek confidence test; it was then that we discovered that its feet had not been screwed down to the floor and the whole unit started to breakdance around the computer room like a deranged washing machine. Two of us leapt at the unit and held it down until the test completed.
  - aswanson 11y ago
    Break dancing humans and RAM. The 80s were awesome.
    - grkvlt 11y ago
      Nope, Disk - That 256MB was spinning platters. At the time you would kill for 256MB of RAM, I guess ;)
  - mirimir 11y ago
    http://everything2.com/title/Hard%20Drive%20Racing http://everything2.com/title/Hard%20Drive%20Racing

kabdib 11y ago

In 1986 or so I did a midnight upgrade of a Vax 11/780's hard drive. It took two people to move a 400MB drive from one Vax to another. No idea how much those cost. I was happy we didn't drop it, because serious injury was quite possible. I often wonder what happened to that Vax. For a couple of years, I was the only person using it. It was glorious.