3 ms·

Back when the Y2K thing was a thing all of these little VAXStation VLC's were being dumped on the market left and right. I had 15 of them at one time with an av

Back when the Y2K thing was a thing all of these little VAXStation VLC's were being dumped on the market left and right. I had 15 of them at one time with an average acquisition price per unit of less than that of a Raspberry pi :-). Even built a 4 unit cluster for fun with a NetGear 4 port switch. Easier to get RasPi's of course, and even easier to run multiple containers running simh to get the same experience. I can recommend playing around with a VAXCluster for while to get a feel for what a nice clustered computer command line felt like back in the 90's. There are still lessons to be learned for current developers of "cloud" systems.

pstuart 7y ago
> There are still lessons to be learned for current developers of "cloud" systems. Any notes of your own or links on such? I'm old school myself (e.g., my first computer was a Northstar Advantage), but I never had the pleasure of working on a VAX.
- ChuckMcM 7y ago
  I kept some notes on my "House of VAX"[1] but really DEC's documentation was a wonder to behold, binder after orange binder on everything. A lot of that is online (scanned) on the bitsavers.org web site. [1] http://www.mcmanis.com/chuck/computers/vaxen/ http://www.mcmanis.com/chuck/computers/vaxen/
  - pstuart 7y ago
    Lots of cool stuff, but I'm curious for your elevator pitch of "VMS could do <awesomeness> but nobody does this today, if they did, they'd make cloud computing even more powerful". Lessons for the lazy, as it were :-)
mustntmumble 7y ago
I find that odd that the VAXStation VLC's were being dumped because of Y2K. VMS has a 64-bit datetime data structure. The C run-time library still had the Year2038 time problem though...
- ChuckMcM 7y ago
  It wasn't just VLCs, at one time in my collection I had an example of every kind of QBUS VAX DEC ever made and every chassis type. That said, its possible that some less than ethical IT people may have used the Y2K fix it mandate as an excuse for upgrading all their toys to new gear, but I know nothing about that.

pstuart 7y ago

> There are still lessons to be learned for current developers of "cloud" systems. Any notes of your own or links on such? I'm old school myself (e.g., my first computer was a Northstar Advantage), but I never had the pleasure of working on a VAX.

ChuckMcM 7y ago
I kept some notes on my "House of VAX"[1] but really DEC's documentation was a wonder to behold, binder after orange binder on everything. A lot of that is online (scanned) on the bitsavers.org web site. [1] http://www.mcmanis.com/chuck/computers/vaxen/ http://www.mcmanis.com/chuck/computers/vaxen/
- pstuart 7y ago
  Lots of cool stuff, but I'm curious for your elevator pitch of "VMS could do <awesomeness> but nobody does this today, if they did, they'd make cloud computing even more powerful". Lessons for the lazy, as it were :-)

mustntmumble 7y ago

I find that odd that the VAXStation VLC's were being dumped because of Y2K. VMS has a 64-bit datetime data structure. The C run-time library still had the Year2038 time problem though...

ChuckMcM 7y ago
It wasn't just VLCs, at one time in my collection I had an example of every kind of QBUS VAX DEC ever made and every chassis type. That said, its possible that some less than ethical IT people may have used the Y2K fix it mandate as an excuse for upgrading all their toys to new gear, but I know nothing about that.