I love the ceremony associated with this machine's retirement. As I get older and have more experience replacing gear I installed and worked with for long stretches of my career, I have started to appreciate ceremony more.
In the last 15-ish years I've taken to stashing notes in and around hardware I've installed. I write the date, an anecdote about the weather or the news, and my name. It has been nice to find these notes years later, when I'm lucky enough to be one retiring the gear. I hope, when other people have retired gear I've installed, they get a little kick out of seeing a voice from the past.
VAX power really did make big leaps from from generation to generation. The 11/750 they started with got about 0.65 VUPs and the VAXstation 3200 they ended with topped out at 2.8, over four times faster. The VAXstation 3100 M76 here, about 18 months later, makes another big jump to 7.6.
DEC spent an enormous amount of money on an emitter-coupled logic (ECL) bipolar implementation as the VAX 9000.
They came to discover that the MicroVAX hit ~70% of the performance at a fraction of the cost.
That was an expensive dead end.
"Production problems pushed back its release, by which time these fears had come true and newer microprocessors like DEC's own NVAX offered a significant fraction of the 9000's performance for a tiny fraction of the price.
"Roughly four dozen systems were delivered before production was discontinued, a massive failure. "
We had one of these at CERN in the experimental physics group I was in 1990-1991. I had no idea they were rare or that the line was a failure. It was certainly faster than the other machines the group had access to at the time (except an onsite Cray, access to which was restricted only to members from "Western" countries for political reasons).
It wasn’t a discovery: DEC knew the 9000 wouldn’t be competitive against VLSI implementations! DEC’s board really should’ve replaced Ken Olsen by 1985 at the latest.
> There are several quotes by prominent engineers on the NVAX project that describe Olsen's unwillingness to kill the 9000 even after being told point-blank that it would not be competitive by the early 1990s,[14] and his outright rejection that such a thing was even possible.[18]
The line between stubbornness and persistence is very thin. It's easy to rationalize post-factum that A was right to push his idea even when everyone told him it won't work, and B was stupid not to listen when everyone told him it won't work.
DEC tried something and failed, that gives me more joy than seeing Intel failing without trying. Transition from Otellini to Krzanich driven by the risk-averse board was painful to watch from within.
Only towards the end.
By the time the CVAX microprocessor inside the VaxStation 3100 shipped in 1988, it was too late for the VAX line.[1] Other microprocessors already dominated.
The VAX 11/780 came out in 1977. It was a long time until a faster model.
There were rumors of a VAX 11/790, and it eventually came out as the VAX 8000 family in 1984. That had about 4x the performance of the 11/780. It was not a microprocessor; the CPU still took up several large boards.
The VAX 8000 had to compete with all the M680x0 machines, and soon, the Intel 386 machines. It was worse on price/performance. DEC had to go back and make a fast VAX microprocessor, which they did. But it was too late.
It was the mid 80's. That was happening to everything. The days of the VLSI scaling inflationary period are almost forgotten now, but it was a wild ride while it lasted.
It was like, blink and you missed virtual memory. Blink again and now you count in gigahertz.
Out of curiosity I looked up a similar-vintage uni host of similar vintage. Latest online evidence I can find dates to the early aughts.
Is there any reliable way of finding a last-effective date for a given hostname?
In related news, many of the services once offered through a locally-administered host are now provided by ... large commercial platforms. Time has moved on, it seems.
I found this earlier this year when researching for a school presentation - it was a joy to read, but sadly did not help me much with my research! I was trying to find some code supposedly hosted on Ucbvax from a research paper. I appreciated the humor in its passing though, and if I ever take an important server down I would love to do a ceremony like this.
Some email certainly was, a lot of local uucp nodes polled ucbvax - this was at a time when UUCP routing was largely manual and people quoted their email relative to well known nodes (like ucbvax) - my business cards said "..!ucbvax!unisoft!paul"
In the last 15-ish years I've taken to stashing notes in and around hardware I've installed. I write the date, an anecdote about the weather or the news, and my name. It has been nice to find these notes years later, when I'm lucky enough to be one retiring the gear. I hope, when other people have retired gear I've installed, they get a little kick out of seeing a voice from the past.
They came to discover that the MicroVAX hit ~70% of the performance at a fraction of the cost.
That was an expensive dead end.
"Production problems pushed back its release, by which time these fears had come true and newer microprocessors like DEC's own NVAX offered a significant fraction of the 9000's performance for a tiny fraction of the price.
"Roughly four dozen systems were delivered before production was discontinued, a massive failure. "
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAX_9000
I still have an account. It runs on the Charon emulator.
A little after your time, I wrote code on a DECstation 5000/240 running MIPS/Ultrix. I'm surprised that wasn't faster, and/or available to you.
The vector extensions might have been your niche though.
> There are several quotes by prominent engineers on the NVAX project that describe Olsen's unwillingness to kill the 9000 even after being told point-blank that it would not be competitive by the early 1990s,[14] and his outright rejection that such a thing was even possible.[18]
DEC tried something and failed, that gives me more joy than seeing Intel failing without trying. Transition from Otellini to Krzanich driven by the risk-averse board was painful to watch from within.
There were rumors of a VAX 11/790, and it eventually came out as the VAX 8000 family in 1984. That had about 4x the performance of the 11/780. It was not a microprocessor; the CPU still took up several large boards. The VAX 8000 had to compete with all the M680x0 machines, and soon, the Intel 386 machines. It was worse on price/performance. DEC had to go back and make a fast VAX microprocessor, which they did. But it was too late.
It was like, blink and you missed virtual memory. Blink again and now you count in gigahertz.
Is there any reliable way of finding a last-effective date for a given hostname?
In related news, many of the services once offered through a locally-administered host are now provided by ... large commercial platforms. Time has moved on, it seems.
Looks like the email was sent/received via UUCP or hit one UUCP path.