Looks like the email was sent/received via UUCP or hit one UUCP path.
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.
classichasclass•4h ago
ajross•3h ago
It was like, blink and you missed virtual memory. Blink again and now you count in gigahertz.
Animats•3h ago
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.
chasil•2h ago
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
eigenhombre•2h ago
chasil•1h ago
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.
KerrAvon•52m ago
> 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]