X-Nico

unusual facts about VAX-11


Starlink Project

By 1982, the project had a staff of 17, serving about 400 users at six sites, using seven VAXen (six VAX-11/780s and one VAX-11/750, representing a total of about 6.5 GB of disk space).


Similar

VAX | VAX-11 | Vax | Vax (vacuum) |

Bentley Systems

MicroStation Version 1, which allowed users to download files directly from their VAX system to their PC to view and plot them (a very primitive Bentley View), was introduced to the market in 1986.

CorVision

CorVision was developed by Cortex Corporation for the VAX/VMS ISAM environment.

Craft access system

The developer, Muchiri Motilewa, designed and coded the proof-of-concept prototype on a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 computer in BASIC and a DEC VAX-11/780 Unix machine in C and Shell.

CT Connect

The initial CTI software from Digital Equipment supported only VAX computers running the VMS operating system both as the server providing the telephone system interconnection and as application clients.

DECstation

The brainchild of James Billmaier, Mario Pagliaro, Armando Stettner and Joseph DiNucci, the systems family was to also employ a truly RISC-based architecture when compared to the heavier and very CISC VAX or the then still under development Prism architectures.

Endianness

Other well-known little-endian processor architectures are the 6502 (including 65802, 65C816), Z80 (including Z180, eZ80 etc.), MCS-48, 8051, DEC Alpha, Altera Nios II, Atmel AVR, VAX, and, largely, PDP-11.

FCX

FCX file compression, an older file compression utility and format used on VAX and personal computers.

HP BASIC

HP BASIC for OpenVMS - Created at DEC, now transferred to HP; PDP, VAX, and VMS platforms

HP BASIC for OpenVMS

When DEC was purchased by Compaq in 1997/98, the products were renamed Compaq BASIC for OpenVMS VAX and Compaq BASIC for OpenVMS Alpha.

Before VAX BASIC (as it was then called), you would only get native RMS support in DEC's COBOL compiler.

Likewise, when Compaq merged with HP in 2001/02, the products were renamed HP BASIC for OpenVMS on VAX and HP BASIC for OpenVMS on AlphaServer.

IFPS

IFPS was available for a variety of platforms, including IBM mainframes (VM/CMS), DEC VAX, various flavors of Unix, DOS-based PCs and Macintosh Computers (named "Mindsight"- running on two floppies).

Japanese encephalitis vaccine

One of them was an inactivated mouse brain-derived vaccine (the Nakayama and/or Beijing-1 strain), made by BIKEN and marketed by Sanofi Pasteur as JE-VAX, until production ceased in 2005.

Jupiter project

This project was cancelled in 1983, as the PDP-10 was increasingly eclipsed by the VAX supermini machines (descendants of the PDP-11).

Kelton Flinn

Island of Kesmai (1981) — expands on their gaming system, in this case trying to use all the power of the university's new VAX computer.

Mike Vax

Vax has performed and/or recorded with trumpeters Freddy Hubbard, Don Ellis, and Don Jacoby, vocalists Joe Williams, Anita O'Day, Barbara McNair, and The Four Freshmen, and other instrumentalists including Art Pepper, Al Grey, Gene Krupa, John Handy, and Louie Bellson.

Milwaukee Electric Tool Corporation

The Milwaukee Electric Tool Corporation is a brand of Techtronic Industries, along with AEG, Ryobi, Hoover, Dirt Devil and Vax.

MMDF

A re-coded variant of MMDF, called Pascal MDF (PMDF) was written at the University of Pennsylvania for VMS and was eventually commercialized through Innosoft, which subsequently ported PMDF to Tru64 Unix and Solaris.

RIDGID

RIDGID's orange tools, sold exclusively in North America at Home Depot, are made by TTI the parent company of Milwaukee, AEG, Ryobi power tools Homelite, Hoover, Dirt Devil, and Vax.

The Wollongong Group

Eunice - A UNIX emulator for the VAX VMS operating system (based on software written by David Kashtan at SRI)

VAX

CPU implementations that consisted of multiple MOSFET custom chips included the 8100 and 8200 class machines.

The performance of the VAX-11/780 still serves as the baseline metric in the BRL-CAD Benchmark, a performance analysis suite included in the BRL-CAD solid modeling software distribution.

VAX 8000

The VAX 8600 I/O cabinet contained a PDP-11 computer serving as the console, a Unibus card cage and provisions for mounting disk drives.

The VAX 8600 was the last VAX to be 100% compatible with the VAX-11/780 and VAX-11/785, to have the PDP-11 compatibility mode, and to use the SBI also used by the VAX-11/78x.

VAX 9000

The VAX 9000, code named Aridus or Aquarius, was a family of Supercomputer and mainframe computers developed and manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) using processors implementing the VAX instruction set architecture (ISA).

Virtual LAN

Although it was possible to use IP routing to connect multiple Ethernet networks together, the VAX-11/780 computers commonly used as routers cost $400,000 each at that time, and their total throughput was significantly less than Ethernet speeds.

ZOPL

ZOPL is still in use at CGI Group (formerly known as RealTime Datapro), who ported it to VAX/VMS and Unix in the 1980s, and to Windows in 1998.


see also