VAX9000 (was: RE: kda50 manual and sdi cables & questions)

[Paul Koning]

>>>>> "witchy" == witchy  <witchy at binarydinosaurs.co.uk> writes:

 >>> Do you have an idea how many VAX9000s were sold? I remember the
 >>> mags of the day full of pictures of a thoughtful tech staring at
 >>> one of the CPU modules, quite possibly thinking 'this costs
 >>> WAAAAAY too much money' :)
 >> I googled a while ago. People said that 454 were sold.

 witchy> That's more than I expected actually. I wonder how many are
 witchy> left......and how many ex digits have one in their garage :)

It's a nice powerful machine.  One of its problems was that it was
originally planned as a water-cooled machine (code name "aquarius").
That ended up being impractical, so plan B was to do an air cooled
somewhat slowed down version (code name "aridus" :-) ).

So a bunch of the technology was done on the assumption that power
density could be very high and speed would be the maximum possible at
that time.  Also, I think it was the only VAX ever shipped out of the
"large systems group" which used to be the PDP-10 group before the
last PDP-10 project got nuked halfway through its development.

     paul