3 ms·

I didn't think a VAX 11/780 was considered a mainframe - rather a minicomputer?

• lproven 4y ago
  Agreed. The VAX 9000 range tried to become mainframes, and the effort to make them bankrupted DEC. But there are non-IBM mainframes. They do run under emulation on x86, but they are still real. Unisys Clearpath, for instance.
  • arethuza 4y ago
    The CS course I did in the 1980s had us use a Burroughs mainframe for the first year (complete with MCP) - I think this was a cunning ploy to make us really appreciate Unix when we got to use for the remaining three years....
    • lproven 4y ago
      Just curious: in what ways? I started out on VAXen before I learned DOS or Xenix, and frankly, I preferred it. File versioning was wonderful and with that as a basis, we'd never have needed the vile baroque mess that is Git.
      • arethuza 4y ago
        The Burroughs user environment was a thing called CANDE - which really wasn't much fun at all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDE
        • lproven 4y ago
          How odd. That sounds very strange, but now I want to try it. :-)