DEC vax 11/750

[Alsilisk]

found this and thought it would be interesting:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/265064917329

[whartung]

Back in the day, one of the guys at the office leased one of these and was doing commodities analysis on it using custom software.

He later returned it and replaced it with a PC and Lotus.

[g4ugm]

Back in the day, one of the guys at the office leased one of these and was doing commodities analysis on it using custom software.

He later returned it and replaced it with a PC and Lotus.

Yes, the 11/750 was the slowest VAX at around 0.6 Mip or VUPs. My pizza box VAX/VLC is about 10 times faster.

[Chuck(G)]

You're forgetting the 11/730. When Sorcim got sold, I was offered their 730 system for haul-away. I declined.

The 750 was what, about half the speed of a 780 for less than half the price? It's been too many years...

[whartung]

We used to have 10 users running on an 11/730. We were giddy when we got the Fujitsu Eagle 400MB drive for a mere $25,000. But, boy did we need the space.

The bulk of the work was Datatrieve, doing data entry and reporting, plus some custom VAX BASIC-PLUS code that I wrote to work on that data. Before we got the new drive, I used to have to copy the entire dataset off to 9-Track, delete it, and read it all back in to merge with the new daily entry, since we didn't have the space. We'd run that over night.

[Chuck(G)]

We used an 11/750 with the Fuji Eagle and a CDC Hawk and, of course, the Cipher streamer for backup. We also had two large MPI line printers and probably 15 (I don't recall the exact number) C Itoh terminals. We ran BSD Unix (4.1?).

I remember the VAX's tendency to chew your fingers up when removing and inserting cards.

The 11/730 at Sorcim was part of a truly arcane setup to build SuperCalc--it involved the VAX, a CompuPro 16/8 S100 system and an IBM 5160. I think Martin Herbach was the only one who knew how to build SC from beginning to end.