Most impressive VAX installations

To anyone listening!

I was flicking through the VAX Architecture Reference Manual earlier
and it got me wondering about the ratio between physically installed
memory in a VAX setup and the maximum theoretical limit of 4 GB. As
far as I'm aware for VAXen the physical never to close to the virtual.

I remember when 64MB was an astronomic amount of memory, which was
around the time of the last VAXes, so I'm asking - how much RAM did
you see crammed into the latest or greatest of the VAXen (and what
else was interesting about the setups, for example maximum number of
users, storage etc)

Or just tell me to get a life ;)

Mark.

urbancamo wrote:[color=blue]
> To anyone listening!
>
> I was flicking through the VAX Architecture Reference Manual earlier
> and it got me wondering about the ratio between physically installed
> memory in a VAX setup and the maximum theoretical limit of 4 GB. As
> far as I'm aware for VAXen the physical never to close to the virtual.
>
> I remember when 64MB was an astronomic amount of memory, which was
> around the time of the last VAXes, so I'm asking - how much RAM did
> you see crammed into the latest or greatest of the VAXen (and what
> else was interesting about the setups, for example maximum number of
> users, storage etc)
>
> Or just tell me to get a life ;)
>
> Mark.[/color]

I don't know of ANY VAX that actually supported four GB of memory. I
don't recall the largest VAX memory I ever encountered but I doubt if it
was more than 128 MB.

RISC processors, such as the Alpha need a great deal more memory for the
executable code, about four times as much as a VAX. With the Alphas, a
GB or more was not only reasonable but also possible! But only if you
were very rich! ;-)

At 07:15 PM 10/31/2008, Richard B. Gilbert wrote:[color=blue]
>urbancamo wrote:[color=green]
>>To anyone listening!
>>I was flicking through the VAX Architecture Reference Manual earlier
>>and it got me wondering about the ratio between physically installed
>>memory in a VAX setup and the maximum theoretical limit of 4 GB. As
>>far as I'm aware for VAXen the physical never to close to the virtual.
>>I remember when 64MB was an astronomic amount of memory, which was
>>around the time of the last VAXes, so I'm asking - how much RAM did
>>you see crammed into the latest or greatest of the VAXen (and what
>>else was interesting about the setups, for example maximum number of
>>users, storage etc)
>>Or just tell me to get a life ;)
>>Mark.[/color]
>
>I don't know of ANY VAX that actually supported four GB of memory. I
>don't recall the largest VAX memory I ever encountered but I doubt if it
>was more than 128 MB.
>
>RISC processors, such as the Alpha need a great deal more memory for the
>executable code, about four times as much as a VAX. With the Alphas, a GB
>or more was not only reasonable but also possible! But only if you were
>very rich! ;-)[/color]

We had a VAXcluster at MCI that I implemented that had 4 VAX 7640's, I
think 2gb of memory each, 4 star couplers, 10 HSC95's (all fully-loaded
with requestor cards), 10 EZ50 electronic drives and a whole slew of 1gb
drives (RA74?). It was for high-speed call statistics processing. We also
had VAXen that were really loaded with memory, as we had a database system
implemented in non-paged pool, using user-written system services to access
them (how cool is THAT???). In addition, we had literally hundreds of VAX
systems of various sizes, some desktop but mostly servers.

Needless to say, when AXPs came out, it made things a WHOLE lot easier and
faster!

...and then came UNIX and Windows...well...

------
+-------------------------------+----------------------------------------+
| Dan O'Reilly | "There are 10 types of people in this |
| Principal Engineer | world: those who understand binary |
| Process Software | and those who don't." |
| [url]http://www.process.com[/url] | |
+-------------------------------+----------------------------------------+

Richard B. Gilbert wrote:[color=blue]
> urbancamo wrote:[color=green]
>> To anyone listening!
>>
>> I was flicking through the VAX Architecture Reference Manual earlier
>> and it got me wondering about the ratio between physically installed
>> memory in a VAX setup and the maximum theoretical limit of 4 GB. As
>> far as I'm aware for VAXen the physical never to close to the virtual.
>>
>> I remember when 64MB was an astronomic amount of memory, which was
>> around the time of the last VAXes, so I'm asking - how much RAM did
>> you see crammed into the latest or greatest of the VAXen (and what
>> else was interesting about the setups, for example maximum number of
>> users, storage etc)
>>
>> Or just tell me to get a life ;)
>>
>> Mark.[/color]
>
> I don't know of ANY VAX that actually supported four GB of memory. I
> don't recall the largest VAX memory I ever encountered but I doubt if it
> was more than 128 MB.
>
> RISC processors, such as the Alpha need a great deal more memory for the
> executable code, about four times as much as a VAX. With the Alphas, a
> GB or more was not only reasonable but also possible! But only if you
> were very rich! ;-)[/color]

[url]http://www.compaq.com/alphaserver/vax/archive/vax10000.html[/url]

says 3.5 GB.

Arne

On Oct 31, 9:15*pm, "Richard B. Gilbert" <rgilber...@comcast.net>
wrote:[color=blue]
> I don't know of ANY VAX that actually supported four GB of memory. *I
> don't recall the largest VAX memory I ever encountered but I doubt if it
> was more than 128 MB.[/color]

I have a client with VAX 6000 series that contain 1.25gb of memory. I
was at the Sungard facility in PA this past week and they have a VAX
7630s with over 2gb+ installed. The spec for the VAX 7000 says 3.5gb
maximum.

On Sat, 01 Nov 2008 05:00:33 -0700, FrankS <sapienza@noesys.com> wrote:
[color=blue]
> On Oct 31, 9:15*pm, "Richard B. Gilbert" <rgilber...@comcast.net>
> wrote:[color=green]
>> I don't know of ANY VAX that actually supported four GB of memory. *I
>> don't recall the largest VAX memory I ever encountered but I doubt if it
>> was more than 128 MB.[/color]
>
> I have a client with VAX 6000 series that contain 1.25gb of memory. I
> was at the Sungard facility in PA this past week and they have a VAX
> 7630s with over 2gb+ installed. The spec for the VAX 7000 says 3.5gb
> maximum.[/color]

Just curious why they continue running theses as opposed to, say, ES47?

--
PL/I for OpenVMS
[url]www.kednos.com[/url]

Not a single system, but I came across comments in the disk shadowing code
for a bugfix where a byte field was being treated as a negative number
if it exceeded 127. That byte field was the number of nodes in a cluster,
and it was found by a customer (I think I know who), not internal testing.

Also the test followed a decrement of that field, meaning a node left the
cluster, so the bug wouldn't have been seen unless there were 129 or
more nodes in the cluster at some point. (Supported limit was/is 96)

In article <op.ujxxcay0hv4qyg@murphus.hsd1.ca.comcast.net>, "Tom Linden" <tom@kednos.company> writes:[color=blue]
>On Sat, 01 Nov 2008 05:00:33 -0700, FrankS <sapienza@noesys.com> wrote:
>[color=green]
>> On Oct 31, 9:15*pm, "Richard B. Gilbert" <rgilber...@comcast.net>
>> wrote:[color=darkred]
>>> I don't know of ANY VAX that actually supported four GB of memory. *I
>>> don't recall the largest VAX memory I ever encountered but I doubt if it
>>> was more than 128 MB.[/color]
>>
>> I have a client with VAX 6000 series that contain 1.25gb of memory. I
>> was at the Sungard facility in PA this past week and they have a VAX
>> 7630s with over 2gb+ installed. The spec for the VAX 7000 says 3.5gb
>> maximum.[/color]
>
>Just curious why they continue running theses as opposed to, say, ES47?[/color]


Perhaps because an ES47 is an Alpha and not a VAX?

--
VAXman- A Bored Certified VMS Kernel Mode Hacker VAXman(at)TMESIS(dot)COM

.... pejorative statements of opinion are entitled to constitutional protection
no matter how extreme, vituperous, or vigorously expressed they may be. (NJSC)

Copr. 2008 Brian Schenkenberger. Publication of _this_ usenet article outside
of usenet _must_ include its contents in its entirety including this copyright
notice, disclaimer and quotations.

FrankS wrote:[color=blue]
> On Oct 31, 9:15 pm, "Richard B. Gilbert" <rgilber...@comcast.net>
> wrote:[color=green]
>> I don't know of ANY VAX that actually supported four GB of memory. I
>> don't recall the largest VAX memory I ever encountered but I doubt if it
>> was more than 128 MB.[/color]
>
> I have a client with VAX 6000 series that contain 1.25gb of memory. I
> was at the Sungard facility in PA this past week and they have a VAX
> 7630s with over 2gb+ installed. The spec for the VAX 7000 says 3.5gb
> maximum.[/color]

With what Sungard charges, I suppose they can afford it! Was that the
Philly office? Been there, awesome collection of hardware!!

Tom Linden wrote:[color=blue]
> On Sat, 01 Nov 2008 05:00:33 -0700, FrankS <sapienza@noesys.com> wrote:
>[color=green]
>> On Oct 31, 9:15 pm, "Richard B. Gilbert" <rgilber...@comcast.net>
>> wrote:[color=darkred]
>>> I don't know of ANY VAX that actually supported four GB of memory. I
>>> don't recall the largest VAX memory I ever encountered but I doubt if it
>>> was more than 128 MB.[/color]
>>
>> I have a client with VAX 6000 series that contain 1.25gb of memory. I
>> was at the Sungard facility in PA this past week and they have a VAX
>> 7630s with over 2gb+ installed. The spec for the VAX 7000 says 3.5gb
>> maximum.[/color]
>
> Just curious why they continue running theses as opposed to, say, ES47?
>[/color]

In the case of Sungard, it's necessary in order to support their
clients. Sungard offers a disaster recovery site for companies that
need such. If you have a contract with them and something horrible
happens to your data center, you let them know, grab your backup tapes,
go there, and restore your backups on their hardware. It ain't cheap
but it does keep you up and running when lightning zaps your substation
or or a 747 tries to land on your roof.

They have an awesome collection of hardware over there! It's probably
both bigger and faster than what you have because they have to support
the largest customer with a contract at that site. They have a UPS that
has to be seen to be believed. There are diesel generators in the back
yard that they can fire up before the batteries run down.

At the opposite scale of things...

I ran an all mighty Microvax 2 with 8 megs of RAM and a 154meg drive to
support 8 users runing WPS-Plus. The success of the project lead the
MVII to be upgraded to 16 meg of RAM to support 12 users.

This was circa 1987.

JF Mezei wrote:[color=blue]
> At the opposite scale of things...
>
> I ran an all mighty Microvax 2 with 8 megs of RAM and a 154meg drive to
> support 8 users runing WPS-Plus. The success of the project lead the
> MVII to be upgraded to 16 meg of RAM to support 12 users.
>
> This was circa 1987.[/color]

And today a single word processing user is using a PC
with 4 MB L2 cache, 2 GB RAM and 320 GB disk ...

HW has changed !

Arne

Arne Vajhøj wrote:[color=blue]
> JF Mezei wrote:[color=green]
>> At the opposite scale of things...
>>
>> I ran an all mighty Microvax 2 with 8 megs of RAM and a 154meg drive to
>> support 8 users runing WPS-Plus. The success of the project lead the
>> MVII to be upgraded to 16 meg of RAM to support 12 users.
>>
>> This was circa 1987.[/color]
>
> And today a single word processing user is using a PC
> with 4 MB L2 cache, 2 GB RAM and 320 GB disk ...
>
> HW has changed !
>
> Arne[/color]

It has gotten a lot cheaper!

When someone builds a faster computer, someone else will write slower
software to run on it!

We used to run the entire problem tracking system at the CSC at DEC on a
VAX 11/782. Not a heckuva lot of memory but it supported hundreds of
users...it replaced a PDP 11/70 running RSTS...

At 12:31 PM 11/1/2008, JF Mezei wrote:[color=blue]
>At the opposite scale of things...
>
>I ran an all mighty Microvax 2 with 8 megs of RAM and a 154meg drive to
>support 8 users runing WPS-Plus. The success of the project lead the
>MVII to be upgraded to 16 meg of RAM to support 12 users.
>
>This was circa 1987.[/color]

------
+-------------------------------+----------------------------------------+
| Dan O'Reilly | "There are 10 types of people in this |
| Principal Engineer | world: those who understand binary |
| Process Software | and those who don't." |
| [url]http://www.process.com[/url] | |
+-------------------------------+----------------------------------------+

On 2008-11-01 20:01, "Arne Vajhøj" wrote:
[color=blue]
> And today a single word processing user is using a PC
> with 4 MB L2 cache, 2 GB RAM and 320 GB disk ...
>
> [...][/color]

Don't forget the 256 MB of RAM for the graphics card ... ;-)

Michael

--
Real names enhance the probability of getting real answers.
My e-mail account at DECUS Munich is no longer valid.

On Sat, 1 Nov 2008 18:31:54 UTC, JF Mezei
<jfmezei.spamnot@vaxination.ca> wrote:
[color=blue]
> At the opposite scale of things...
>
> I ran an all mighty Microvax 2 with 8 megs of RAM and a 154meg drive to
> support 8 users runing WPS-Plus. The success of the project lead the
> MVII to be upgraded to 16 meg of RAM to support 12 users.
>
> This was circa 1987.[/color]

Impressive, but look back and read what OS/8 was able to do!

VAX 7000-630 running OpenVMS V7.1
System Memory Resources on 1-NOV-2008 18:17:01.31

Physical Memory Usage (pages): Total Free In Use Modified
Main Memory (2048.00Mb) 4194304 3855692 275650 62962

On 1 nov, 02:15, "Richard B. Gilbert" <rgilber...@comcast.net> wrote:[color=blue]
> urbancamo wrote:[color=green]
> > To anyone listening![/color]
>[color=green]
> > I was flicking through the VAX Architecture Reference Manual earlier
> > and it got me wondering about the ratio between physically installed
> > memory in a VAX setup and the maximum theoretical limit of 4 GB. As
> > far as I'm aware for VAXen the physical never to close to the virtual.[/color]
>[color=green]
> > I remember when 64MB was an astronomic amount of memory, which was
> > around the time of the last VAXes, so I'm asking - how much RAM did
> > you see crammed into the latest or greatest of the VAXen (and what
> > else was interesting about the setups, for example maximum number of
> > users, storage etc)[/color]
>[color=green]
> > Or just tell me to get a life ;)[/color]
>[color=green]
> > Mark.[/color]
>
> I don't know of ANY VAX that actually supported four GB of memory. *I
> don't recall the largest VAX memory I ever encountered but I doubt if it
> was more than 128 MB.
>
> RISC processors, such as the Alpha need a great deal more memory for the
> executable code, about four times as much as a VAX. *With the Alphas, a
> GB or more was not only reasonable but also possible! *But only if you
> were very rich! ;-)- Tekst uit oorspronkelijk bericht niet weergeven -
>
> - Tekst uit oorspronkelijk bericht weergeven -[/color]

One of my VAXstation 4000-90A's has 128 MB main memory. Which is its
configuration maximum IIRC.

Hans

H Vlems schrieb:
[color=blue]
> One of my VAXstation 4000-90A's has 128 MB main memory. Which is its
> configuration maximum IIRC.[/color]

Mine too. And yes, it maxes out at 128MB. But that was
an impressive (and expensive) amount of memory back then.

On Nov 1, 8:37*am, "Tom Linden" <t...@kednos.company> wrote:[color=blue]
> Just curious why they continue running theses as opposed to, say, ES47?[/color]

Many years of poor decisions.